On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:39:57 -0400, Tekkie® wrote:

Glad to hear the gray well water cleaned up.
Was the real problem ever determined?

We can never be sure, but what we did was hike downhill from the
spot the 500 foot well was dug. We hiked about 500 feet below
that house and then we dug into the hillside (it's public open
space, so, we just dug without permission with our hands).

Since the hill is steep, there was only about six inches of
top soil, which we kicked away with our boots, and we noticed
that there was a wide expance of gray "mud" at that level.

When we stopped for a moment to survey the area, we belatedly
noticed a "band" of no vegetation at about the same level,
crossing the mountainside along the isocline.

Given that we kicked away the topsoil in a half dozen spots,
where this band seems very localized (about 100 feet long and
only about 6 feet to 15 feet in height), our *assumption* is
that there is a band of mud that was mixed up with the
Franciscan sediments 30 million (or so) years ago when
the Pacific plate rammed into the edge of California.

So, what we *think* happened is that the well drillers simply
hit that "puddle" of gray mud at about 500 feet and that it took
months to pump all that mud out from the pocket that the drillers
were obtaining the water from.

The funny thing is that just those two houses experienced that
gray mud, which even the well drillers said was odd in our area,
so, take everything we say with a grain of salt, but do realize
there are a lot of engineers on this hell who have pondered this
situation, so, that's the best we could have come up with.

BTW, the 100-foot long 15-feet wide bridge and treehouse was put
on hold because the storms blew it down. But we rebuilt it, and
we're starting to build the 16-foot-by-16-foot treehouse itself,
but this time, we anchored 1/2 inch steel cables to hold the
treehouse *above* the 100-foot long bridge (Jeff Liebermann is
always welcome to visit and I'll show it to him since he lives
near by).

If you want, I'll snap some pictures of the new setup, but, it
will look really nice since it's 80 feet above the ground when
it's all done. Right now, we have the 100-foot suspension bridge
done, and we're starting on the treehouse itself, which is going
to be floating above the suspension bridge about 75 feet from
the hillside and about 25 feet from the anchor redwood and about
80 or so feet above the ground.