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.