Adobe Springs

The spigot and the street light

At 19000 Del Puerto Canyon Road, Patterson, about 18 miles up the canyon in the Diablo Range of Stanislaus County, a spring runs out of public spigots for anyone who brings jugs. There is no fee. The Magnesium Online Library, which shares a post office box with the spring’s operator, gives the terms in two lines: “Free water may not be sold. There’s a street light at the Free Spigot for night loading.” The Adobe Springs Water Co. calls the arrangement a community initiative and invites visitors to take water “directly from the source, free of charge.”

The people at the spigot tend to come back. Writing on the Find A Spring listing on April 22, 2023, a visitor named Jack reported “quite a drive” and several strangers filling containers. One was a rancher who said he had come by every week for 15 years. That day the road was a little flooded, so the party parked on the shoulder and crossed on foot. The spring manager, Paul Mason, posted a warning on April 1, 2012: “In winter, the Adobe Springs spigot may freeze at night, and not thaw out until Noon! So in winter, I recommend coming after Noon.” The water is not always running. On February 14, 2024, a visitor found the spring temporarily closed. On March 29 another reported it “back up and running with some improvements.”

The same listing gives the spigots as open around the clock except for a maintenance closure, and it states that closure two ways. One line says Sundays, noon to 6 p.m. Another says Saturdays, 10 to 4. The Sunday version adds that the hours are subject to change without notice “if bottlers or truckers need a change.” The tanker trucks that load at the spring have first claim on the schedule.

Del Puerto Canyon Road follows the creek west from Patterson to the San Antonio Valley and meets State Route 130, which runs on to San Jose. Elias Funez, writing in The Valley Citizen in February 2020, described wildflowers on the slopes in spring, sightings of bobcat and mountain lion, and one of the West’s largest golden eagle populations. Frank Raines Regional Park, a Stanislaus County park, lies along the same road about 18 miles west of Patterson. Funez also reported plans by the Del Puerto Water District for a 260-foot dam at the Gateway, the rock narrows at the canyon mouth. The reservoir would flood the first five miles of the canyon and force the road to be rerouted.

Water from serpentinized rock

The canyon’s rocks are layered by age. Funez wrote that the Gateway is built of Coast Range Ophiolite, old seafloor tilted up by tectonic movement. West of it the road climbs past the era of the dinosaurs and through metamorphic layers, up to where rocks from the earth’s mantle lie exposed and “resemble other worlds.” In 2009 the journal Planetary and Space Science published a paper titled “An alkaline spring system within the Del Puerto Ophiolite (California, USA) – A Mars analog site.”

Adobe Mountain, the bottling brand drawn from the spring, describes the source as a single pressure-fed spring rising through fractured ultramafic rock. It says the water climbs under its own pressure through serpentinized mantle rock, which enriches it with magnesium and stabilizes its pH. The operator gives about 110 milligrams of magnesium per liter. Adobe Mountain gives about 100, with a calcium-to-magnesium ratio of roughly 1 to 7 and total dissolved solids averaging 400. The Find A Spring listing records a pH of 8.73 and dissolved solids of 437, and the company states 8.8. A visitor who tested his own jugs at home on January 1, 2022, got 336 and 9.01. The owners told another visitor, in 2019, to keep the water out of direct sunlight. At the plant the company treats the water with ultraviolet light. The listing puts the flow at more than 72 million gallons a year.

Tankers to Modesto

The commercial trade came first. By the company’s account it first shipped water to Modesto 7-Up in 1991, and 7-Up bottled it under the Noah’s Spring Water label. The Magnesium Online Library dates the state license, from the California Department of Health, to 1992. That is the same year the company gives for the spring beginning to run free to the public. The Find A Spring listing adds O2Cool to the brands drawn from it.

A 2011 company listing on Bottled Water Web named Gary Dutey Sr. as president and chief executive. It priced a tanker load of 6,400 to 6,600 gallons at $500, about 7.6 cents a gallon, and observed that “the caps cost more than the water, and the labels cost more than the water.” The spring was then selling about 10 million gallons a year. Tankers had carried it south to Colton and north as far as Calistoga. On September 25, 2011, the overflow from the tanks measured 142 gallons a minute. The same listing described the governing board as state-licensed contractors, average age 45, who had pledged surplus profits to magnesium research, conferences, and education. That year the company helped fund seminars through the Société des Recherches Magnésium in Europe and a magnesium research center in Hawaii. The Magnesium Web Site, which carries the spring’s sales notice, was first uploaded on September 29, 1995. Ray Tackaberry, its “Successor Librarian,” also answers the company’s telephone.

In 2020 Funez reported thousands of gallons going daily to the 7Up bottling plant in Modesto. The company now describes Adobe Springs as California’s only mineral-spring water source and the supply behind private-label still and sparkling waters for large retailers. It says its family has stewarded the source for over three decades. Its own sparkling brand, Adobe Mountain, took the Silver Medal for sparkling water at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting in 2026.

La Vereda de Montana

The water drew travelers long before the trucks. The canyon and its Gateway belonged to the Hoyumne and Miumne Yokuts, who moved between Del Puerto Canyon and the San Joaquin River. They left grinding rocks, cooking ovens, burial grounds, and dwelling structures. They also cut a pathway into the Gateway rocks, and its weathered handholds and steps remain. Spanish explorers crossing inland in the late 1700s named the rock opening “Del Puerto,” the doorway.

Funez calls the spring a flowing artesian well and an important stop on La Vereda de Montana, the Mountain Trail. Native American and Mexican travelers used the trail to cross between Northern and Southern California through the Diablo Range undetected. He writes that Indians fleeing the coastal missions lost Spanish search parties in the maze of these mountains. Tributary canyons carry names such as Hideout Canyon and Murderer’s Gulch.

From the 1820s until United States occupation in the early 1850s, Mexican horse drovers from Sonora came through the Gateway, among them Joaquin Murrieta. They held wild mustangs in the box canyons, then drove as many as 300 head a year south along the trail to the next watering hole and on to Sonora for sale. One historian, Frank Latta, placed Murrieta’s hidden herds on what is now Adobe Valley Ranch, along the Adobe Creek tributary near the spring. On June 10, 1862, the surveyor William Henry Brewer camped in the “Door Canyon.” He met a herd of thirty or forty antelope, then a sheep ranch where “two men keeping four thousand sheep” lived in a cabin.

In 1916, with the First World War under way, miners found magnesite deep in the canyon. Engineers graded a bed for the narrow-gauge Patterson and Western Railroad up to Jones Station. By 1920 the mines no longer paid, and in 1921 the line’s two locomotives were sold to logging operations. When the rails came up they left a graded roadbed, and Del Puerto Canyon Road runs on it today.