Where’s the Water? Ask the Dowser.
Finding water on a ridge top, as in where is a good place to drill and how deep will it be before there’s good water, is the topic of this edition of Radio Curious. Our guest is Rob Schroeder, a water well driller based in Ukiah, California and employed by Weeks Drilling of Sebastopol, California.
Rob Schroeder says he’s also an amateur dowser. That’s a person who tries to locate a good spot from which to drill for water by using a divining rod, which is a bent metal rod or a forked branch from a tree. Rob and I walked in the redwood forest on a ridge top about half way between Ukiah, California and the coastal village of Mendocino, a distance apart as the crow flies of about 35 miles. In addition to the divining rod, he looked for certain trees and other signs indicating that a vein of water could be near. You’ll sometimes hear the crunch of leaves as we walked among the trees on November 10, 2013.
We begin with Rod Schroeder’s description of the divining rod that he uses, how to use it and a guess as to why it works.
The book Rob Schroeder recommends is “Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means,” by Russell Means and Marvin Wolf.
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