Changes

Water in the Desert

Hi, my name is Sherry Frey and we bought property outside of Winnemucca Nevada.  When my husband, Phil, and I were getting ready to retire, we knew we wanted to be in the West and we wanted to be off the grid.  We found this property and when it was time, we moved to Nevada.  We found that you have to have a licensed well driller to drill a well.  The well driller takes care of permits or any other documentation needed.  We talked to several well drillers in town to determine who we could use. The problem any well driller will have in this area will be the jeep trails.  These are the only roads to our property and you have to have 4-wheel drive most of the time.  We were through most of the bad weather for winter and the sand was not too soft yet.  I used copper divining rods to find a spot for the well.  When the well drillers came out on a Monday, they did the same and ended up in the same spot, and then they set up to start the next day first thing.  Well things don’t always go as planned, they were using our backhoe and one of the hydraulic lines broke which meant a trip to town, so the next day they actually got started drilling and within maybe four hours water came rushing out.  You can’t imagine how excited we were to see that water.  You see, we have been hauling water for the past 3 years.  We have a big 250 gallon tank that we would fill with water for the horses, and Phil would fill 7 gallon jugs and pour into our camper.  So when the water came in cold and clear and pumping at 200 gallons a minute, we were ecstatic.