City to Gritty

You guys! THE SPRINGS WERE STILL RUNNING! Click the media bar above to listen to the full episode per the usual, but I am going to change the format of this blog post to break up the gallery into sections to make it easier to digest.

First thing first – we arrived and the water was still flowing! In both places! We arrived after Greyson’s amazing t-ball game on Saturday so there was not enough time to start working on our water system. We did have a chance to review our game cams though! My game cam had literally zero nature pics (womp womp), but the one Steve placed by our newly dammed spring captured a doe and a mystery animal! We are sure that there are not armadillos in this area, but we cannot figure out what might look like one. Steve suggested a rat, and I am going to choose to just ignore that…

Sunday. Day One. 9am, we decided to focus this weekend’s attention on the upper spring since it was already dug back a significant amount… First we continued to dig back the water source to try and access a more clay like soil to help with the water retainage. We removed the weird piping that has been there for who knows how long. Used a 2′ x 4′ sheet of food grade acrylic, PVC, 6mm plastic sheeting, river rock, and a power drill with a hole drilling bit. Steve drilled two holes in the acrylic dam for a lower output that would gravity feed to the spring box about 10 feet down the ravine. The other hole would be for an overflow pipe and a system shock access point. All of our overflow valves are double covered with aluminum mesh and zip tied x3 to keep the nature out.

Below is the gallery for this step:

By the time we got this dam phase completed and the pipe leading to the future spring box site we took a break to wait for the dam to fill enough to start coming out of the pipe that will inevitably fill the spring box. Gravity is a funny thing and visually hard to gauge sometimes, so we wanted to be sure it came out of the dam before we moved on to the next stage. About four hours later HUZZAH! The water was flowing from the pipe! Now to assemble the spring box… Our spring box consisted of a 5gal bucket with lid, three holes (input from dam, output to first barrel, and overflow). The output line would span from the spring box to the first barrel approximately 35 feet away…

After we confirmed the water was filling and flowing to the spring box we started trying to figure out where the barrels needed to go to get that good gravity flow rate. It was A LOT further than I had anticipated – approximately 35ft. Thankfully there is a really steep edge of the ravine we were able to use the contour of to lay the piping to keep it out of the way of any ravine traffic.

How Greyson’s tiny hands saved the day…

Steve purchased two 55 gal barrels previously used to store peanut butter of some kind. We tried our best, but they still definitely still smelled like peanut butter… Oh well. These barrels, though, only had valves on the top, they did not have a lid, so two piece grommets that Steve was relying on to connect the PVC were not going to work since we couldn’t get our hands in to secure the inside piece – enter Greyson to save the day! He was not only able to get his hand in there, but he was strong enough to hold it while Steve tightened it.

Due to this limitation on grommet placement based on Greyson’s reach inside the barrels, we were forced to plumb our input valves on the top of the barrels giving us that much more of a drop we needed to achieve gravity flow into both barrels. After a lot more shovel work (mind you – it is now almost 8pm on Sunday night – we’ve been at this since 9am) we finally get everything connected around 8:30pm and start hearing that sweet sound of water flowing into the empty barrels. Now to see how much collects!

The next morning, Monday, we get down there about 9:30am and the first barrel is full and the second barrel is almost full. We start gathering rock to back fill the dam, using all different sizes of rock, as clean as possible, to act as a sediment filter keeping sediment out of our dam, for the most part. Around 10:30 we hear the overflow from the second barrel start to trickle. Approx 14 hours to collect 100 gal! After the dam was full of rock, we took some buckets and filled them with overflow water from the second barrel and washed the rocks a few times over. Finally, we laid a double layer of 6mm plastic and covered it with dirt to make the area look as back to normal as possible. We buried the PVC piping and secured it with rebar. We took an orange shirt and tied it off to the PVC that was left exposed to make it more noticeable to wildlife in hopes they would avoid it.

AND THAT’S IT FOLKS!

In August we will plan to bring up at least one larger tank, some hose, and a solar pump to start working on pumping the water out of the ravine and towards the homesite. We may not get all the way to our final cistern site next month, but eventually we will!

One step at a time, one weekend at a time, we are making this happen. This weekend was monumental, for me at least. I looked at what we created and how we created it using so little in materials and what it will mean to our future. I was, and remain still, in awe of what we are doing and how very possible it is so far.

Even though 90% of the weekend was consumed by the water collection system we also found time to do a few other things! We went to town and had lunch at Tiger Town Brewery and found a few river access spots to check out the John Day River. Due to the fire bans currently in place we acquired a propane fire pit which was awesome. We had a few great starry nights too. Overall, it was great, but the heat really kept us from getting to rowdy this visit. On our way out to the highway headed home we were stopped by a GIANT rattlesnake. We were in equal parts awe and terror realizing that this is a very real predator and we need to take the time to teach the kids what to look for out there. Steve decided that clearing brush at the homesite needed to be a higher priority since these deadly creatures like to take refuge in brush. Yikes!