prune picker

This is the blog of a prune picker. (Native born Californian) Retired oilfield. I am an old man. I blog a lot about my body and getting old. As I approach death life gets more interesting. More interesting is not good. I still drive. I attend sports, music, and civic events. I am writing my memoirs. I attend swim class three times a week. Some of my blogs might be interesting. A lot of my blogs are silly and trivial. None are very long.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

First oil well in Nevada.

I was a logging engineer working for Schlumberger  in Sacramento, California in 1954. The state of Nevada had posted a large sum of money to give to the first company to complete an oil producing well in Nevada.

Shell Oil was drilling Eagle Springs 1-35 in Railroad Valley, Nye County near Ely, Nevada. My logging crew was sent to log the well. The crew consisted of two men in a logging truck and the old prune picker in a car.


It was a 12 hour drive. I remember that when we drove up to well that Shell had the drill pipe out of the hole and were waiting for us to start several hours of logging. After a 12 hour dive I was ready for a nap, not for 12 hours of work!

I was the first person to see the electric well log of the oil zone in the first commercial oil well in Nevada.  I was operating the log recorder.

Does that make me famous? I finally did get a nap.

Later on in my 15 years with Schlumberger I logged other discovery wells, but for oil fields within a state. I tried a couple of times in the state of Washington but the geology did not cooperate.

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