Thursday, May 30, 2013, Guerneville, CA.
My friend Bryce needed some help with his spring
Bryce has been having some problems with his spring that provides water to his house and his orchard. It stopped a couple days ago. I said I’d help him out with it finding why it’s not working.
He lives up on a hill top, so I drove my car up there on Sweetwater Springs road and met him at the house this morning. He had his Quad runners out, which we were going to ride down into the canyon and up the hill on the other side where his spring is at. There’s some old fire and logging skid roads on his property, so we would negotiate them to get fairly close to the spring where we would then have to hike almost straight up the hill to his spring area, about four hundred yards or so.
This picture is from his house looking across the canyon. We need to go almost to the mountain top, just up a little and to the left of center.
We are riding the quad runners for the first part. Down the road to the creek and up the other side and across to the area on old roads. That’s Bryce leading off from his house.
Once we made it to the end of the road, we dismounted and started our hike almost straight up the hill. Bryce leads the way again. ;O)
We arrived at his spring and did a water measurement to check how much water was coming out of the buried spring tap. There was some water coming out, but not how much there should be at this time of year, so we had to uncover the tap to find out what was wrong. It wasn’t plugged up with dirt or rocks, Nope, not that. It had about four or so little sixteenth inch roots going into the pipe intake, likely from redwood trees. Those few little roots grew into a big cob of roots inside the pipe. Bryce worked for quite awhile with a hook device until he got it good enough to pull it out. It didn’t want to come out and it took awhile for him to get it started out.
Bryce just started pulling the root out of the spring tap pipe and was surprised it was so big. He’s just holding some of it, as he’s pulling it out of the pipe.
He pulled the root all the way out. It turned out to be over six feet long. Here he is holding the root mass up. It grew inside a two inch pipe.
We put all the spring stuff back together and made some plans to extend the two inch pipe longer with a de-rooting section so it can be cleaned easier next time as there is no way I know to stop these roots from returning. This is just two years of growth, as that’s how long it’s been since the last time we were in there.
We laid the roots out on the cement when we got back to the house. See below.
Enough work for one day, let’s go down and check out your orchard. So we did. He has a lot of fruit trees, , apricot, cherries, apples, avocados, Macadamia nuts, pistachios, oranges, tangelos and lemons, prunes and plums and more.
This photo is in his orchard, near his old barns. Some of his trees. All that I was able to sample right now, were his tangelo’s and and orange, and they were real good. Nothing else is ripe at the moment.
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From these mountains one can look down on the Santa Rosa area, which in the picture below is just about as far as you can see.
OK, I was tired out now, so I went home for a long nap. Eventually I came around and went out and put screw eyes in my van to hook my new bed mosquito net to and I changed my down comforter to a lighter one for the summer, so now the bed department is ready to go.
Another nice day.