We got your stinkin' drilling rigs right here

There's so much talk these days surrounding the pros and cons of drilling. For us, it's mostly about the pros. One day last week I got to spend some time with Joey "chasing the rigs", getting called out to a drilling rig to do some welding. We started out on an early morning call to do a quick weld on a pipe "head"...on the mesa of this mountain range:


We enter right in the center and hit the first of FOUR guard shacks, and a sign loudly stating 1) No Drugs 2) No Alcohol 3) No Firearms 4) No Cameras. Driving on....and up....

The roads look great today, but I couldn't even imagine going up these roads in slick mud or slippery ice, perhaps even hauling a trailer loaded with long pipes. Yikes. That's a long way to the valley below.


We're only about half way up at this point, and then we come across this creepy tunnel.

It seemed to go on for three miles, at least, but was really only half a mile, but at only ten miles per hour, a thirty degree incline, and thick, deep mud...it seemed like we were in there for an hour.

When we popped out of the tunnel it was like we were in a different place.

It was lush and green, and felt nothing like work.
Once we arrived to the drilling pad though, Joey did get to work.

He spent about five minutes welding, and ten minutes dealing with an ass of a company man, before we drove back across the mesa and down the mountain.


You can barely see the roads. See the zig zag lines? Big rigs and heavy machinery...on zig zagging, skinny dirt roads, with a steep incline..definitely not for the weak of heart.


We were back home in two and a half hours, fed the kids, and took them swimming in the campground's lake.


Late in the afternoon Joey got another call for another quick job, so I decided to join him again. This drilling rig was at the bottom of the mountain, along the Colorado River.


All the rigs up here are drilling for natural gas, and they hit gas with every single well. The rigs also pop up and down daily, as they quickly hit gas and move on. We don't know too much about it, but originally the gas companies came here to extract oil from the shale rock, and accidentally hit natural gas, so for the last four or five years they've just been concentrating on the gas and put the shale aside. They say there's twenty years worth of work in these mountains....so I've got some time to get all the details.


From the mesa to the valley floor....all in a good day's work.