Down in a gully I found there was
water trickling out of the hillside. Maybe 10 feet below grade and 3 feet above the bottom of the gully. There’s always been a big wet sticky mud pile there with some clear water trickling over it. So I put on the muck
boots and started digging. More like slopping this stuff down the hill.
What I found was two clearly defined layers- orange sand/gravel on the bottom, gray clay on top. The water seems to be percolating up through the sand/gravel layer and running out.
This is odd to me since my understanding was that water flows down until it hits something impervious like clay, but here the impervious clay layer is on top.
The more I dug into the hillside, the more clay clumps fell down. The next day the hole had collapsed entirely, but still had a clear trickle of water (maybe a bit more concentrated into one stream now.)
My intention is to head it and measure the flow, maybe someday going into a spring box and whatnot for collection. Since I clearly cannot dig very far back into this hill (since it’s a 10 foot wall of clay and mud above)
Should I maybe stack some stone to stabilize the wall and put my spring head in front of that? Maybe cut a plastic drum in half lengthwise to make an arch to stick into the hillside and support the dig?
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