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Sunday, January 27, 2013

Hidden Valley Tank

If you look close at the picture with the roof over the canyon you can see a cement wall below it.  The wall is a dam that is supposed to hold water back and form a small reservoir of water for the bighorn sheep that are up in the KOFA mountains.  The dam was leaking and needed to be repaired.  Jim and I went up to help with the work.  It was a thirty mile drive in to the area with the last 6 miles being barely a road.  Where the road ended we had to walk another mile in to Hidden Valley because no vehicles are allowed on the refuge where there is no designated road.  There was a forty foot ladder to climb up to get to the tank itself.  Once up there we worked hauling rock and gravel out of the tank so we could get to the bottom of it and find the leak. 

We did have a gas powered pump to pump the water out which helped but we had to do a bucket brigade to get the rock and gravel out.   Jim did four days of this work while I went twice.  The tank was cleaned out enough to get to the bottom and sealer was applied to the bottom and walls.  The last day they were pumping water back in to the tank.  Jim had laid out a mile of firehose to pump the water through from the water truck up to the tank.  The picture of the valley between the rocks shows the firehose at the bottom winding through it. 

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