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A week ago while I was panning for gold I followed a mountain stream to its source 2 miles off of the trail and it was just ejecting water from under the ground. Today, I followed another stream that was 5 miles away in the same mountain range for the sole purpose of inspecting the source. To my surprise it was the same. I know I’m not the only one to ponder this but it got me thinking.. how can the water table be so high here? How can this just be from rain water while the mountain acts as an aquifer? These streams feed grand falls and rapids a few miles downstream. How do they not run out of water during the dry season (now)? Is it possible that there is some other forces at work here? Geological pressures putting forces on deep underground aquifers causing them to eject from the mountain ranges where the bedrock is fractured?

It’s probably a stupid question.. but all my life I assumed these streams originated from hundreds of brooks feeding them. I assumed that as I followed these streams I would find a body of water that gradually narrowed as I passed smaller and smaller brooks feeding it until I came upon a dry gully.

A week ago while I was panning for gold I followed a mountain stream to its source 2 miles off of the trail and it was just ejecting water from under the ground. Today, I followed another stream that was 5 miles away in the same mountain range for the sole purpose of inspecting the source. To my surprise it was the same. I know I’m not the only one to ponder this but it got me thinking.. how can the water table be so high here? How can this just be from rain water while the mountain acts as an aquifer? These streams feed grand falls and rapids a few miles downstream. How do they not run out of water during the dry season (now)? Is it possible that there is some other forces at work here? Geological pressures putting forces on deep underground aquifers causing them to eject from the mountain ranges where the bedrock is fractured? It’s probably a stupid question.. but all my life I assumed these streams originated from hundreds of brooks feeding them. I assumed that as I followed these streams I would find a body of water that gradually narrowed as I passed smaller and smaller brooks feeding it until I came upon a dry gully.

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[–] • 4 pts

Don’t confuse artesian springs with seepage springs. The water coming out of the side of a mountain at high elevation isn’t being pushed up from thousands of feet below. Seepage springs are caused by the rock and soil of the mountain absorbing precipitation (rain and snow) which forms a water table at that elevation, and the spring is where the water finds its way out.

[–] • 2 pts

Have you ever crunched the numbers before, though? Napkin math tells me that if it rained exactly 1” of precipitation over a square mile, that would be enough water to fill 2.19 Olympic swimming pools. A semi small mountain stream that moves 24 cubic inches of water at 3 miles an hour will drain those two swimming pools of water in just 73 hours. We get around 50 inches of rain a year give or take around here. Unless my math is just way off, which is highly likely, it just doesn’t seem like a logical conclusion that the source for these two streams are just seepage springs.

[–] • 0 pt

My childhood neighbors had a spring in their back yard it ruined** their pool two times. I remember sitting staring out my window down into their backyard watching the workers tear it down when they finally quit trying to make it work