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bldginsp
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# Posted: 24 Mar 2016 01:53pm - Edited by: bldginsp
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That is an interesting document. It was put together primarily as a resource for farmers who need high flo wells. They mention some wells flowing at 2000 gpm- that's amazing.
The document focuses solely on conditions in 6 valley areas, and ignores the surrounding mountains, because they were focusing on ag use which is only in the valleys. Still, it gives good information about expected flow rates in different geology types, which might give you an indication of what to expect in terms of flow rate, if you know what's under your mountain. But a rock formation that is considered poor for ag use can be just fine for residential, since you can get by with 3gpm or less depending, but you want at least 10. Still this is a far cry from what farmers must have for crops. The focus of the study is locating high yield geology types for farming wells.
Julie are you close to any of the six valley areas described in the study, and if so, what is the difference in elevation between that valley floor and your place?
My parcel is about 300 feet above the surrounding large valley floor which has a high water level, drought or no drought. I hit water at 300 feet, right where you would expect it. But a neighbor of mine lives at the bottom of the hill, less than 100 feet above valley floor and very close to it. He, too, hit water at 300 ft., a good 200 ft below the adjacent saturated valley floor. Go figure.
They say that on hillsides the water tends to follow the contour of the land. At the same time if there are big impervious rock masses in the mountain, and you, by bad luck, end up boring through the middle of such a rock mass, you could bore much deeper than the general surrounding water level before you hit a fissure in the rock mass that supplies water. Sometimes when this happens, all of a sudden water rushes into the bore hole and fills it up to 50, 100, 150 feet of water where it was a dry hole until the fissure was hit. In my case I hit impervious serpentine at 360 feet, and immediately hit a fissure in the serpentine that supplied 30 gpm where before we had only 10 gpm boring in lava. So it goes.
One guy across the valley had to go to 800 feet, but he has water. Another guy got to 600 ft., hit serpentine and a series of fissures, and got a flow rate of 60 gallons a minute. Ya never know til ya go.
There was a poster on this site who talked about his well in I think Georgia. He was in solid granite which is entirely impervious. Eventually he hit enough cracks and fissures to eke out a small flow rate and was glad to get it. I forget what depth.
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Julie2Oregon
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# Posted: 24 Mar 2016 02:17pm
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Littlecooner
Awesome! Thank you for looking this up! I will read it over the next few days, for my purposes and also because I find this sort of thing interesting! 
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Julie2Oregon
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# Posted: 24 Mar 2016 02:46pm - Edited by: Julie2Oregon
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bldginsp
I don't know what valleys are listed yet not having read it but I'm above the Yonna Valley.
I guess I'm not too surprised by the gpm rate you mentioned because what's interesting about this area -- and the city of Klamath Falls -- is the use of geothermal. Klamath Falls heats city buildings and even provides heated sidewalks/ice clearing downtown via geothermal. Apartments and homes downtown have geothermal heat and hot water.
There are a plethora of springs in my area that I've seen on other maps and hot springs northeast of me. Native peoples named my little town what they did because of the abundant springs, I've read.
The water situation for me is just as you described. When you get into the elevation, it's trickier. I'm several hundred feet above Yonna Valley. Something perhaps in my favor is that my land is fully level and not sloped anywhere. Much of the land in the elevations is sloped. That *could* be one of the factors in the wide differences in well depths since water flows downward.
But there are so many factors that you don't really know.
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bldginsp
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# Posted: 24 Mar 2016 07:54pm
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Yonna Valley is one of those in the study, I didn't look at it closely. Let us know what you learn about the geology below your feet.
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Julie2Oregon
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# Posted: 25 Mar 2016 01:06am
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While not giving it a CLOSE read yet, I did scan quite a bit of the text. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what boundaries they used for the various valleys because, even by their own descriptions, what they describe is awfully close and perhaps overlapping.
But what's very puzzling is that they describe mountains that are rather far off but don't mention Bly Mountain, which is RIGHT THERE, at all. The elevations for "the mountains" they generically term as existing around Yonna Valley and Swan Lake aren't correct, either. Elevation maps make that quite clear.
So the area right below me is called Yonna Valley. Anecdotally and on Oregon maps I've seen. Is there some overlap with geological elements in some of the other "valleys" this document describes? I don't know. Maybe.
If I look at the Yonna Valley info, it's rather good news and a lot of it makes sense from other things I've read and from the rock/soil I've seen on my own land. But, yeah, most of this is about the valleys.
The bits about confined water lying within a few hundred feet below the surface in the mountains is interesting, however, and the fact that it's a source for a lot of the wells. Would that I could actually located some of that!
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bldginsp
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# Posted: 25 Mar 2016 04:36pm
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Are the springs you talk about above, below, or at the same elevation as your parcel?
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Julie2Oregon
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# Posted: 25 Mar 2016 05:21pm
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Springs are everywhere there. (Hence the plethora of bottled spring water companies north of me.) I'd have to check the elevation map but I'd reckon all three.
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