Rural Heritage December 2025/January 2026

In order to bury the pipeline 5' deep to provide water year-round to the houses and stock, Bruce needed to move rocks that approached the size of a small car. Bruce is on the pipeline road in the background.

“About the last year we bought a track hoe and trenched in the roughest part from the spring to the divide/breakdown; I dug it 5 feet deep. I worked on that the entire month of October. I didn’t do anything besides that. Ride the track hoe the entire day until too dark, then jump on 4-wheeler and come home. That last leg was pulling rocks out, some as big as a Volkswagen, and rolling them down the hill, huge rocks. When Linda asked about what I would do for the day, my answer was ‘I‘m going to work on my legacy.’ She was worried about me, so she admitted she went and peaked at me a few times to make sure the track hoe was still moving. I wanted to be finished before November 1 before it froze up because it got really slick with the track hoe on the side hills. That took the entire month of October to bury a mile 5 feet deep. That was in 2016. “So, then we had fresh spring water year-round to Ellen’s and our new house that we built in 2011. Then I piped to my mom’s house in 2018 and to our old log

to bury the pipeline deeper. That’s when we bought equipment to wear out.” The equipment was the final juncture enabling construction of the pipeline that has made a huge difference on the ranch. Bruce continues, “I bought a trencher and starting in the bottom, closest to the houses, I put pipe in 5 feet deep that first year, a mile probably. That initial pipeline proved the overall concept. So, we worked on it every year a little stretch at a time because it was tough digging, not full time, over the course of 10 years. The last few years of the 10 we trenched it in to a cistern part way up Marty hill on the Gadiant place. It was for winter time capacity: it would go through the winter without freezing because it was buried. When the houses and cattle weren’t using all the spring water, then it was captured in the cistern. Then we added a summertime cistern 4,400 feet high on top of Marty hill but still below the Spring so still gravity fed. That cistern fed a line on top of the ground to the north to the Terraces.

Rural Heritage

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