FRESH WATER while Camped off the Grid

[Ampman]

Just been in a very long extended drought here in central Texas. With all the local growth the aquifers were dropping fast and wells were running dry. We built our own rain water harvesting system and got off the well. Twenty thousand gallons of storage and filtration system for a complete potable water system. Our county even encourages collection with tax breaks on the improvements. Been on it for four years now and have never been below half full. Only regret is not doing it sooner. I always feel good when I'm filling my airstream tank with cloud juice before heading out on a trip.

[Thinair]

Ray - Carla reads this thread occasionally so I can't comment on your avoidance techniques ... Are you sure Nancy never checks to see what you're up to here???

Safe travels!
Chris

[five4freedom]

Rainwater rights for us Coloradoan's are making advancements and rainwater collection barrels have started popping up in garden centers and home-improvement stores in the past few years.

For boondocking, we're putting in a very high-quality water filter/purifier with an external pump and a 100-200ft hose for reaching nearby water sources. Additionally, we'll be hauling along a ~300 gallon fresh water bladder, which can compress very small while traveling. We can also put it in the back of the truck, drive into to town to fill it up, and haul it back to camp.

We'll be diverting awning water to a separate tank and/or bladder for showering/dishes, etc., but would also be able run it through our filter for drinking/cooking.

We're requiring to have a high-quality water filter as my wife is extremely sensitive to fluoride, chlorine and a few other chemicals (not to mention we don't want to be drinking those anyway).

[Ray Eklund]

Our favorite when camping Off the Grid water sources are the Forest Service offices that have a water pump for travelers, or hook up to the side of the building at the tap. The more remote the complex, they are more likely using ground water, filtered and potable.

I have found that our well water, which is from 484 feet into a 1000 feet thick Tertiary rock, grit and sand natural filter from the last Ice Age and being replenished from the snows west of the Front Range is excellent. It is slightly acidic at 6.5pH (7.0 is neutral and anything higher is alkaline), cold and seem to resist becoming "mildewy" over time in our trailer's water tank. It has no taste, although mineralized... not affecting the interior plumbing. There can be calcite crystals when draining the hot water tank after a one to two week trip.

HOW can you test for Acidic Water? Take a cup of the water and add a pinch of baking soda. If it fizzes... Acidic. If it really fizzes... slightly more. Can affect your cooking if adding baking soda, so be aware.

Many Forest Service well water is just as good if not better than our well water, which is excellent. Glenwood, New Mexico Forest Service water... worth filling your tanks. Same with Reserve, New Mexico Forest Service water! Knowing the geology is more important than what minerals are in the water, if potable to the standards today.

Cretaceous formations are full of sulfates and other foul tasting minerals. Ancient ocean deposits as clay or silty sandstones. Areas where petroleum or coal is being mined from formations near the surface... you will taste the difference.

Later Tertiary deposits in the Rocky Mountains are ground up igneous rocks and sands, with silty clay minerals. (Thalweg might want to get into this.) Some of the finest water sources from wells.

The older limestone formations of the Permian and Pennsylvanian Periods produce some excellent well water. North of Lusk, Wyoming from deep wells in the Pennsylvanian is good enough to bottle as Spring Water, at the Boner Ranch.

Know your geology and you can have a good idea of the water quality beneath the surface. If we were to drill our well to 1,000 feet+... we would be in the Denver Formation which is at the end of the Cretaceous when the inner ocean of North America was receding and the beginning of the Tertiary where the Rocky Mountains were being elevated. (Thus the retreat of the oceans...) So in Denver it can be the best soft water from a producing well... or within a coal bog that would digest your iron and copper over time...

[NevadaGeo]

Originally Posted by Ray Eklund

Know your geology and you can have a good idea of the water quality beneath the surface. If we were to drill our well to 1,000 feet+... we would be in the Denver Formation which is at the end of the Cretaceous when the inner ocean of North America was receding and the beginning of the Tertiary where the Rocky Mountains were being elevated. (Thus the retreat of the oceans...) So in Denver it can be the best soft water from a producing well... or within a coal bog that would digest your iron and copper over time...

Much of the oil produced in eastern Colorado is from the DJ (Denver-Julesberg). Water produced from oil wells is usually pretty briny and maybe sulpherous. This has to be reinjected back into the formation with the briny water to protect the potable water formations. Very tough regulations for that. Interesting, in Nevada the produced water with oil is better than surface water, but still has to be reinjected into the formation instead of letting anyone use it. Mine water originally can be quite good, the issue is when air and oxygen gets to the original unoxidized rock, the sulfides in the rock and oxygen and water turn into sulfuric acid and then you get the rusty water. Or sorta like that. Arsenic is natural in a lot of rocks that are interesting to be mined. If you can keep air from getting to the rock, there wouldn't be the mine water problem.

[Ray Eklund]

Thanks NevadaGeo!

The absolutely worst water in Wyoming from the early 1970's was that of Gillette, Wyoming. You felt fresher BEFORE taking a shower.

The oil patch had paraffin wax globs that were difficult to remove from your shoes or clothing and from the salty brine and signs posting for possible Sulfuric Acid gas (cannot recall the signs, maybe SO4). Nobody wanted to work this area, so the young employees were chosen among the victims.

"H2S"... were the warning sides. Do not inhale...

[mandolindave]

The water tastes great. but I should have it checked. The house used to use one of the hillside springs on the property. I've seen a few VERY OLD houses that were built right next to a spring just coming out of the ground.

Anyway, the neighbors up the hill with a few hundred feet higher elevation, had to dig way deep for water for their new house. The sulfur smell is so bad, you can smell it when you walk in the house. I worry about it somehow happening to my house.

I don't know what to believe about fracking, but It could really only make matters bad for me, because I am good now. Although gas royalties would pay for the whole estate in 4 years.

So I'm try to wrap my head around all of this geological info on the thread

[Ray Eklund]

In my neighborhood well depths also vary. Ours is about with the majority. Some wells are much deeper and the "recharge", the rate that you can pump water out is so low, that they have a cistern to fill. That gives them storage of water available to use when needed. Filling like your toilet bowl would after a flush, to make it simple.

If you look out your window today, most places the surface is not flat like an ocean bottom. There are groves of trees, open ground, marshes, rocky spots, rivers, creeks, etc.. You add a thousand or five thousand feet of sediments, the surface sags from the weight and some spots hold more water underground and others less. You can have a dry well with no water and go 100 feet and have a flowing well... This happened in Littleton, Colorado in the early 1900's. The water was under pressure (head pressure) and when drilled it flowed up to the surface and served the city well. When more people moved into the town and it needed more water, the city drilled more wells to discover... the water pressure dropped and it needed to be pumped out of the ground. Now there are experts like Thalweg (Brent) who figure these things out.

Some in my neighborhood have blue grass and water every day. They think this ground water will last forever... and have legal rights to one acre foot of water. A lot of water. They are fools... but lets not go into that.

For mandolindave... Pennsylvania is COAL country. S04 is associated with organic matter. It stinks. It is probably not unsafe to drink, but gives you... gas as well. Because of the extensive research done in Pennsylvania with Coal Mining... there are reports for most parts of the State into the 1870's. They include maps, mine reports, coal quality and probably water reports.

The USGS has been publishing Water Supply Reports since the early 1900's. Probably all are now on the internet for FREE in digital form. The maps, maybe not...

YOU can research your area most likely right now. It is there for no charge if by the State or US Geological Surveys. Any major Coal State will have extensive reports available. West Virginia has nearly every County since around 1915.

Indians never camped ABOVE a spring. Human waste was a big contaminator for them, too.

My wife's brother turned down an Oil Shale company's offer to drill on his property in New York. He thought it would contaminate his well. Well... they could drill right across the street and he would get nothing.

Fracking is as safe as the company doing the work. The larger the company, the more they would have to lose. If they are at 10,000 feet to frack and you are at 70 feet... you have little chance of a problem. Most is imaginary or made up... Wells are not just holes in the ground, but have sleeves inserted to protect contamination of water resources.

Fossil fish of western Wyoming are in a 40,000,000 year old shaley limestone. If you take a scrape off the rock, you call actually smell natural gas from within the stone.

Geologists do not get too alarmed about some of the misleading environmental news. But people will believe what they want to. The days of having Pennsylvania oil wells gushing thousands of gallons onto the ground at Titusville, Pennsylvania of the 1859 is long gone. When oil was $1 a barrel... even around Los Angeles it was a stinking mess.

If it were simple... we all would understand. Some people spend their entire lives studying one county's water supply. It does make good conversation. Sorry, mine was long as usual.

[Ampman]

Collect rain water. Exercise conservation and forget the wells. The ground water is shrinking everywhere and is getting more polluted by the day. We are on rainwater only now and will never go back. Too many straws in the ground now a days.

[Thalweg]

Ray,

You're opening many cans-o-worms here, and I could write a dissertation on lots of them, but I'm not as good of a novelist as you are. Just a few points:

The USGS Water Supply Papers are available here: Search Results - USGS Publications Warehouse
and here:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/wsp/

There are hundreds, if not thousands of them on every water related topic you could conceive of. They are probably the best information available, but may not be written for the average-Joe reader.

Water quality in Gillette has improved significantly over the years. I believe that they used to use a lot of surface water in their supply, but now have a well field south of town completed into the Fort Union formation (coal). It's very good water. They are in the final stages of developing a new well field and pipeline system near Devils Tower. It's out of the Madison formation. I don't know the water quality, but the Madison is pretty deep, and I've seen some Madison water that hasn't been all that impressive. I think the intention is to mix the poorer Madison and better Fort Union water to achieve a desired quality standard.

I don't think in terms of geologic periods like Ray does, and can't make water assessments based on that, but typically, around here, the deeper the formation, the poorer the quality. I worked a 10,000 ft injection well near Big Piney that had Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) of around 100,000 milligrams per liter (mgl). Fresh water may have around 500-2000 mgl. Some of the coalbed methane wells south of Gillette were producing water from about 1000 ft with TDS of 1000 mgl (incredibly good water). There were areas that the water had lots of iron, but it was very sporadic.

Shallow groundwater, being from unconfined aquifers are more susceptible to degradation. Things spilled on the surface can leach into the water, while deeper, confined aquifers are usually protected from leaching by a clay or shale layer. However, some of the best groundwater I've ever encountered is from the Sandhills region of northern Nebraska, which are mostly unconfined aquifers.

Fracking is a topic that is a little too politically contentious to discuss in depth. However, I will say that virtually everything you see in the media about the topic is completely wrong. The media has done a huge disservice to the public hyping topics they have no understanding of. "If it bleeds, it leads", and all they're concerned with is selling "news". I researched water quality impacts associated with fracking a couple of months ago, and couldn't find an impact that wasn't the result of poor well completion. Also, at least in the western U.S., most fracked oil and gas wells are MUCH deeper than any aquifer used for domestic water supplies. So there are numerous confining layers between the production zone and the aquifer. Therefore, I'm confident in saying that with proper oversight and responsible operators, fracking can be done safely.

H2S is a serious issue. In low concentrations it's harmless, but the odor can be annoying. However, you get desensitized to it and won't smell it after a while. It's flammable, and in high concentrations it's lethal. We get a little bit around here, but usually only late in the summer when the aquifer gets drawn down, and only notice it when the water warms up (Boyles Law). That's why Yellowstone stinks: hot water.

Brent

[Ray Eklund]

Originally Posted by Ampman

Collect rain water. Exercise conservation and forget the wells. The ground water is shrinking everywhere and is getting more polluted by the day. We are on rainwater only now and will never go back. Too many straws in the ground now a days.

*****

First thank you Brent the "water man" for your wisdom.

Most people do not realize that some ground water sources are from the Pleistocene Ice Age. As towns and cities grow they actually are depleting the underground water reservoirs. Agriculture uses a lot of the "Ogallala Aquifer" has reduced this amazing underground water supply to the point that some wells are not as productive. Rain water, I feel, cannot "restore" these large underground aquifers... ever.

My water supply is tens of thousands if not several millions of years in the making. Just by random luck of the geology of the area. Otherwise... we would be dependent on the water from rivers in the Colorado Front Range like the Denver area.

If you are on a well and believe you can use as much as you want... you are just depleting this resource to a future generation that will have possibly NO water and the town is put in a situation to pipe it in, or move...

Find a United States Geological Survey Water Supply paper for your area, if a study had been made. The information is now dated, as most are forty to ninety years old... but it is very interesting to some of us.

[Thalweg]

Nearly anything you want to know about groundwater can be found here:
USGS Groundwater Information

Brent