After 160 Years, We Finally Hit Water...

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]We found water today. After 160 years, this town had water. I saw the water. A lot of water. Then we kept drilling.

[00:00:12]Then an hour later, it was gone. I don't think that we have good news.

[00:00:18]>> We can't go up and we can't go down.

[00:00:21]>> And now there's 600 ft of pipe stuck in the ground. And I'm trying to figure out if I made a very expensive mistake. All we can do is drill another hole.

[00:00:43]So right now I am sitting in Sra Gordo which used to be the largest silver mine for the state of California. a place that produced hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ore. And to do that used hundreds of thousands of gallons worth of water, which is remarkable because the vast majority of that water had to be brought up an 8 mile dirt road that increases a mile in elevation using mules in the 1800s. Because this town has never had a reliable source of water. There have been major attempts and failures starting as early as 1871 when they ran a pipe to a spring which promptly cracked. Then in 1873 when they ran 11 12 miles of piping to a different spring which they promptly ran dry. Then in 1913 when the new owner took out a lease on a spring a few miles from here which ended in all sorts of lawsuits till eventually they reverted to capturing a small trickle of water that comes in 700 ft down in the main mine here. So there is a history of grand attempts and failures at water here. And I moved up here just over 6 years ago with a dream of bringing this town back to life. And that's meant restoring some of the old cabins, exploring some of the abandoned mines, and even building a commercial hotel. And my hope is for this town to survive for future generations, for them to learn the history of it. And I know after 6 years, for that dream to come true, we need reliable running water. We need to drill a well. And at this point, it just feels like all of my hard work over the past six years is bundled up into whether or not we can make that happen, which I guess we'll start to find out today.

[00:02:52]I'm Damon Arvin. This is Adam Keller.

[00:02:55]We're with Keller Drilling and Pump out of Chico, California. What we plan on doing is getting this conductor casing down about 20 to 40 feet just to help us with any unconsolidated material from falling down and getting into some good rock. And then we plan on drilling a test hole about 600. We're hoping to find water around 600 ft. Potentially we could go 1,000 plus to hopefully find some water. It be a challenge, but it'll be fun. We've already had flat tires and overheating trucks and it's cold.

[00:03:27]>> So, we're excited and uh look forward to this opportunity.

[00:03:36]>> So, here's the plan. We are not just arbitrarily drilling and hoping for water. Over the years, I have had everything from water witches to hydrogeeologists come up and tell me where the water might be. And in this case, we're going with the hydrogeeologist. And the theory is somewhere below me there is a band of rock known as the rest spring shale. And in that shale could be water. And we have reason to believe that because that same band of rock intersects the 700t level of the mine here where a little bit of water drips in. But to get to that rock is not going to be easy. First we have to go through a lot of loose material that fell in from the mountains over the years. Then we're going to get into a few hundred feet of limestone known as the Keeler Canyon Formation.

[00:04:23]And underneath the Keeler Canyon Formation, we should in theory get into the Rest Spring Shale. And once we're in that shale, we want to go down deep enough to intersect a few pockets of water that might be there. Again, that is the theory, but up here, theories don't always work out.

[00:04:42]>> What are the feelings for uh the well?

[00:04:44]>> Very exciting.

[00:04:45]>> Yeah. historically. So, >> it's going to change the game. We're getting a hot tub. I'm palm trees like Oh, yeah.

[00:04:52]>> Putting a pool.

[00:04:54]>> Pool day.

[00:04:54]>> Pool.

[00:04:55]>> Yeah.

[00:04:56]>> All right. And so it begins. Hopefully the future of Sarah Gordo All right. So, they got 20 ft of the piping down in the ground. And now they're going to put another 20 ft on top of that, weld it together, and drive that down. So, then there's 40 ft of piping down there that they'll drill inside of to prevent some of this loose gravel and stuff from falling in over and over. So, the hope is to get down to more hard rock, then just start open drilling it.

[00:05:47]Yeah, it's really loose material. We're going to try to get that other 20 ft on and get it down to 40 ft. Okay.

[00:06:00]>> All right. Now, trying it with the water and the foam. So, hopefully this gets us free of that material that's clogging the hole.

[00:06:21]All right, so day three. I think we're down about 160 ft. Avery, how you feeling about the progress?

[00:06:29]>> Feeling pretty good. It's slow but steady. We're good.

[00:06:48]You know, this isn't an easy area to drill in. If we were down in Owens Valley, that is kind of this aluvial wash where all these things have fallen in off of the mountain and you have some sediment, some sand, some rocks, and the water accumulates and you can just drill down and get into that. Up here, we are in what would be a fractured rock aquifer. And so up here, it might look kind of like dirt, but if you go down to the mines, you'll see it's hard rock around here. And so up here, the water is going to be in fractures in that rock, in that shale, in that limestone.

[00:07:24]And thanks to Mensu, who is a hydrogeeologist that helped us out here, the idea with this would be to intersect a number of those shell pockets that has water sitting in it. I think we're over 200 ft now, maybe even approaching 300 ft. And obviously every second I'm hoping for a text or a yell that we hit some water. But we're going to get down there, see where we're at, and maybe any updates.

[00:08:08]So, you may be wondering, how are you going to know if you're in water anyways? And apparently, you will know in the morning, water will have accumulated overnight. And when you turn on the air compressor that's usually used to blow out the fragments of rock out of the hole, it will blow out water in the morning because then you'll know that that was not water that you were putting down to assist in the drilling.

[00:08:33]Let's go down there and see what's going on. on. I don't want to get too excited cuz we're not to the target depth yet.

[00:08:39]But let's see what's happening. I'm starting to hear whispers that maybe, just maybe, there's more water in the hole than there should be. You think today's the day?

[00:08:51]>> Today should be the day. Not.

[00:09:01]We're only going to let it sit for 15 minutes and then blow on it to see if we see something cuz it it blew out a lot of water this morning.

[00:09:06]>> Did it? And that would be more than it accumulated overnight or you just don't know.

[00:09:10]>> Yeah, it's hard to say.

[00:09:11]>> Yeah, >> it looks promising.

[00:09:13]>> Okay, cool.

[00:09:14]>> All right, so we're going to try to test it. It's 9:35 right now. We just blew the hole pretty much clear of any water visible, so it should be empty. We're going to wait 15 minutes and see if we can blow it again. If water comes out, that could be a better indication that it wasn't just stuffed last night.

[00:09:38]All right, another moment of truth. We let it wait for 15 minutes and now we're going to see if it's a go. This is our second time going now. It should be totally drained of any water. So, if any water comes out, that means that we're in some type of water.

[00:10:12]Woo! We got water. We got a lot of water after all of these years of searching.

[00:10:21]It's coming out over here, too. And we got something like 5 gallons a minute right now, which is just crazy.

[00:10:31]This was dry just a minute ago, but now water. What do you think?

[00:10:37]>> Water. We are in some type of water.

[00:10:40]We've blew out the hole dry a few times and still more water kept coming out.

[00:10:47]We're still not in the formation necessarily that we're looking for that shale. I'm trying to temper my excitement because sometimes these fractures, they can drain in a day, a week, a year, or whatever. So, ideally, what we're trying to do is intersect a few of these different fractures and let it go to the bottom and pump it out.

[00:11:03]Obviously, part of me is nervous cuz what if we lose the water we're in? But this needs to be a sustainable well, but we're in some water here at Sarra Gordo.

[00:11:13]Now, we have a big decision to make.

[00:11:17]didn't seem like there was any more water accumulating or anything.

[00:11:23]>> Tonight, we're going to try a test to come to a closer idea of how many gallons per minute we're getting, but it's been blowing water. And if you would have told me that when I woke up this morning, I would be super super happy. Hopefully, it's getting closer.

[00:11:38]It's a lot of water.

[00:11:42]If you look around, there's still snow on the ground, but it is getting warm.

[00:11:47]And up here at Sraordo, something that I always have with me, no matter the season, no matter whether we're drilling a well, I'm exploring an abandoned mine, or going on a hike, is Element. And Element is an electrolyte mix that's only sodium, potassium, magnesium. So, all you do is take this little packet, open it up, put in a water bottle, shake it up, and you're good to go. You're not going to get the dehydration headaches.

[00:12:08]You're not going to get the cramps.

[00:12:10]These days, they even have these cool cans. And if you are looking for an electrolyte mix, they're giving a free sample pack of their favorite flavors with any purchase. All you have to do is go to drinkelement.com/brent and they're going to hook that up.

[00:12:24]Again, element good no matter what the season, no matter what you do. I hope you check it out. Let's get back to drilling.

[00:12:35]So earlier we were in water for many hours and we kept going to hopefully intersect more of the different fractures and now the bit got jammed up or something to where we can't even get the pipe out of the hole. It seems like things fell in on top of it or muck is around it and we can't get air to blow it out. And so that fast went from so excited thinking of all the things I was going to do with the water to now we're stuck.

[00:13:11]And I think we have like some rings of mud above and below the bit. So we can't go up and we can't go down. And there's no air coming out. So hopefully you get it figured out somehow. We're going to give it another go and hopefully get this pipe unstuck. We just put some water down the tube. Hopefully that moves things along a little bit. Big moment for us.

[00:13:47]Another day and the drill still stuck.

[00:13:50]And obviously hindsight it's 2020, but we were in water from about 720 ft and then we weren't in water all of the sudden. And obviously part of me is like, well, we could have just called it good enough when we were at 620.

[00:14:06]But my hope and the mentality of the time was to try to create a well that lasts for many years. It's very sustainable. And to do that, I was hoping to intersect a few of these cracks. So, only one way forward now, and that is to get this drill unstuck and hopefully keep going down. So, I don't even want to think through the worst case scenario where this pipe doesn't come out at all.

[00:14:41]>> I don't think that we have good news.

[00:14:43]That's stuck. Stuck. Can't turn. Can't go down. What uh what should we do?

[00:14:48]>> So, I have a a hammer special hammer at the top.

[00:14:52]>> Yeah.

[00:14:53]>> I doubt it's going to work, but I can try it. And uh other than that, all we can do is drill another hole.

[00:14:59]>> Okay.

[00:15:00]>> Okay. So, either something large has fallen off the sidewall and got you wedged up down there. We're drilling on air, right?

[00:15:08]>> We are drilling with air. Yeah.

[00:15:21]uh we're stuck with 600 plus feet of piping. It won't go up, it won't go down, it won't turn. And that is a very expensive proposition. One option is we could try to hammer it out. Another option is welding things to the pipe itself and then trying to jack it out.

[00:15:40]And a final option could be sending dynamite to the very bottom of the pipe, blowing it up to hopefully get out the pipe above that. And why it's stuck, we don't exactly know, but it seems that there is an accumulation of material above the drill, the hammer, and the hammer itself is clogged, so no air or water can get down. So, we're pulling it up and we're just accumulating more and more stuff to the point where it becomes like cement. The positives of the situation is that there is water. I saw the water. You saw the water. A lot of water. So, for now, we're going to plan the next steps here. Keep moving because when we were drilling, we uh lost our water for a short period of time. So when the water quit, our cutings just fell on top of the bit and it happened really fast and we moved up and we got stuck. So we've pulled as hard as we can with the rig, which is about 40,000 lbs. So now we've brought up our casing jacks. The best way to grab the pipe that we have is to weld some metal lugs on to the pipe. And we're going to use these jacks to push while we're pulling with the rig. Should give us over 100,000 lbs of pole and hopefully break it loose. Come out of the hole.

[00:17:06]>> Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

[00:17:08]>> All right, a moment of truth. We're hoping that this just pushes this pipe up.

[00:17:15]>> The jacks aren't wanting to pull it out of the hole. So far, it's not doing it, but maybe there's some more oomph that we can give it. It's a lot of pressure going up and not going anywhere. Hard to believe that with 100,000 plus pounds of force, it's not pulling it out of there.

[00:17:45]Well, of our two options today. Option one, using the jacks is out. The jacks bent and we were not able to get the pipe out any more than 2 ft or so. Just a bit too much pressure on her >> when we had uh all the pressure with the jacks pushing up.

[00:18:02]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:02]>> And then we're lifting up with the rig.

[00:18:04]The problem is when you let down with the rig, now the jacks have all the pressure of the jacks plus the rig.

[00:18:10]>> Yeah.

[00:18:10]>> And it don't take much. And then it just went.

[00:18:13]>> So there are the jacks. Not looking too good. They're bent up.

[00:18:20]>> Well, it's about to be a very big moment. About to try the hammer to get this pipe free. And this is kind of our last shot before the dynamite. And I just really really can't have the dyninoite option happen. It's just the idea of spending all this money to not be able to use this hole. Seems like we're so close. But everything up here at Sagoro is hard. I just want something to be easy for once. And it hasn't been easy so far. But let's see.

[00:18:49]Watch out, dude.

[00:19:24]Well, this is where it's at. This is 600 ft of pipe that's still stuck in the earth. We've pretty much exhausted our resources at this point of what we can do. For a very brief moment, we were getting 5 10 gallons per minute of water out here and it just stopped. And I think that's the hardest part about this is that in an alternate universe, we stopped there and this is working well and kind of had that momentum to carry forward to the rest of the projects. And instead, we're looking at completely starting over on this thing. And that's a tough pill to swallow, but I'm not the first person that thought we had water figured out at Sarra Gordo.

[00:20:08]And so like I have over the past six years, we're going to have to just keep going. It's just another hurdle along the way. And maybe one day this will just be a better story of getting the water up here. That day is not today for me. But I appreciate you guys checking out the video.

[00:20:26]We'll see what comes next.