Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

What in Spring Creek Basin have our wily and handy BLM’ers been up to lately?

I’d been out of the valley for a little while, visiting my folks for the first time since the pandemic started (they had visited me just *before* the pandemic started), and I came back to find two of my favorite BLM guys wandering toward the basin one morning with a little tractor in tow! I had some chores to catch up on, so I didn’t meet up with them until their last day of work last week. There was a little crowding of tools and things in the bed of their pickup.

After stretching a string from one end of the roof structure to the other (new horizontal steel-pipe post pieces had appeared since I’d been there last!), Daniel Chavez (pictured) and Garth Nelson got to work welding purlins to those pipes.

They welded three purlins over the three sections of roof structure over the four tanks. As they said, that line of purlins was critical to get straight because the gutter will go under the roof under those purlins. Into that gutter will go the rainwater and melted snow … life-giving water from heaven … into pipes into the tanks into the trough for the mustangs!

Because of my slow-Internet issues that make drafting blog posts a long-term commitment these days (!), this is a short teaser post about what they’ve been doing. I do promise at least another post to show the progression of purlin welding (because it’s fascinating and shows how handy our guys are!)! This last-for-now pic shows water dripping out of the steel pipe at one end of the roof structure after Garth poured some of his water in from the top end. When the project is all done and the roof is on, water will NOT flow through these steel-pipe posts; it’ll hit the roof and flow to the gutter and thus to the tanks. But he and Daniel illustrated that there IS a slope to the roof (though it deceivingly looks fairly flat), and you can see the now-welded-in-place purlins across this section of roof structure and Garth grinning in the background, and it’s never a bad sight to see water dripping from above in the desert. 🙂

More to come. Promise.

Another highlight of note: Did you notice the cloudy sky in some of the pix? Thankfully for Daniel and Garth, it was cloudy and relatively cool most of the day while they were in their welding jacket and Nomex (?) shirt for welding. I wore my headnet to keep the gnats at bay (they were worse some times than other times) while I helped hold purlins in place with my great and amazing strength (!) until the welds held (!). The previous two days – and the whole of the previous week! – had been HOT (like, 100-degrees hot). … And at the end of this day and the evening after the next day, we got some sprinkles from Mother Nature. Welcome relief. 🙂