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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Allen" data-source="post: 482657" data-attributes="member: 389">Artesian simply means it is flowing out of the ground and no pumping is required.  A good fraction of the artesian wells in western ND are completed in the Fox Hills formation.  It tends to be fairly saline, some of you might like the salty taste of it.  It is also often high in fluoride and you will recognize people who grew up drinking it because they tend to have mottled teeth due to the excess fluoride.  If I remember correctly, trace metals can also be high in some Fox Hills wells, things like arsenic, selenium, and mercury.FWIW, horses and cattle tolerate saline water better than humans.  We tend to prefer our drinking water with up to about 300 mg/L of total dissolved solids (TDS) for taste reasons, once you get up to around 1500 mg/L (especially if it's sulfate based TDS) it can have a laxative effect on some people.  Cattle can drink water in excess of 5,000 mg/L of TDS.  Not knowing this exact well, and not having found it on the ND Dept of Water Resources website, I'd probably not drink too much of it.  That being said, during long strolls in the badlands on a warm November day, there have been times I was damn glad to run across an artesian well.Anyway, I am going to guess this was installed for cattle, not human consumption.  Which means the water quality and sanitary nature of it might be in question.At one point, the town of Alexander had an artesian well right along the road going through town.  My parents would always stop there to get "refreshed" when we would pass on through.  I think they may have plugged that one a few years ago due to water quality/liability concerns.If this is a true artesian well that's completed in the Fox Hills formation, it should get plugged if it's not being used.  Artesian pressure is a finite resource.  Back in the early 1900's, there were a lot of great artesian wells put into the Dakota Sandstone in eastern ND.  People didn't restrict the flow and wasted the water only to eventually run out of pressure in some areas, and for the wells themselves to turn saline after they removed all the fresh water.  If you live out east, that saline strip of land out by Kelly's Slough near Emerado is a great example of where the Dakota Sandstone seeps up to the ground surface.   Similarly, the West Fargo Aquifer was also at one time artesian by nature.  It has had enough water removed from it to where it's generally no longer considered artesian at this point.</blockquote>

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