Once frost has left the road base and the road has become workable, I use geotextile stabilization fabric with outstanding results. For new road or driveway work I try to get the fabric in place before the site gets muddy, eliminating the need for excessive stone at the start. Geotextile fabrics can effectively eliminate muddy conditions on a road by keeping gravel surface materials from mixing into the road base as wheel loads push the road surface materials down. Geotextiles provide a modern, low cost, permanent solution and are gaining wide acceptance.
If you are building a road through an area of known weak soil condition or have a road that turns to soup each spring, plan on using a geotextile under the road surface for a permanent solution when possible. If you have a few sink holes here and there and have to make them passable during the spring, try adding stone. Then one day tragedy strikes the mountain. Angry and afraid, she bolts into the mountains where she gets lost in a thunderstorm, tumbles down an incline, wrenches her ankle, and encounters Claude—this time in an abandoned mine.
Claude reveals some secrets of his own, including his role in a mine disaster and how that led to his becoming a recluse.
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The main character,Camie, is a girl most fifth graders can connect with. The plot is simple and refreshing. Richard Sullivan rated it it was amazing Sep 08, Linda A Durrin rated it really liked it Aug 28, Monte rated it it was amazing Sep 06, Judy Barker rated it it was amazing Mar 29, Janet rated it really liked it Jun 17, That reminds me, does anyone have suggestions for keeping new loose rock from getting moved off road.
I imagine applying it when the ground is soft and then compacting it would help, walking on a loose rock is so annoying. Here are the pictures I promised - I hope they help. It hasn't been raining today, but it was last night. Water is flowing in my hand-dug ditch, but the entire low-area is not flooded just a puddle or two - so that's a big improvement.
However, when lots of rain is coming down the entire area up to the berm of my ditch is flooded in 2" of water. The animal areas across the driveway are very mucky this year. I put them there because it did have rock and was very solid and nice one year ago In the last picture, all that muck used to be my looped driveway, but it's a steady down-hill until it flattens out just before connecting with that other bit of road in the first pictures.
I have much more road, a large parking area and road to my pump house, but these are the only places that are in need of help - so I guess it's not to bad: Jami, thank you for the photos. It helps a lot. It appears from your photos, that if you look 12 inches to the right and left of your driveway, that the ground level is about the same height as your driveway, give or take a few inches. That is why your driveway is always soggy and mushy.
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If you raise your driveway 12 inches and put knitted 2 inch stone on top, like I described above, you will not get any more potholes, or soggy driveway. If this results in a wider driveway, then move your fence. Even if you put blacktop or concrete at the level it is now, it will sink and crack.
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It must be raised high enough that the additional mass will dissipate the load so enough to no longer sink when your subsoil gets soaked. Also, I can't tell how all the water running down the hill and into your ditch and french drain, gets off your property.
You need to provide a place for that water to go so it doesn't swamp your driveway in a storm. If you want to improve the puddle area that is low without doing a major renovation you can use the method I outlined Hans Quistorff wrote: You may be able to use some of your rocky slope as a base in the puddles and then the fines the side of the road that is higher than necessary. My driveway across a one foot flood plain which is clay was established years ago as a CCC work project with a ditch on both sides. It had to be widened to bring the hose in so they cleared the vegetation on the field side and added subsoil to move the ditch over 5 feet.
That made a grassy slop to one side just like yours. The road is even better now because the drainage from the floodplain is farther from the main road bed. There were a few ruts and low spots from the construction traffic but also a pile of drain stone left over so I was able to repair using the method outlined above. What my raw milk dairy does for the path to the milking parlor is put down a strip of the canvas that is used to carry the paper as it dries in the paper mill but that scrap may not be available in your area.
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Check with carpet layers for replaced carpet it will work well over a path of arborist chips. When it gets covered with cow pies turn it over and the rain will filter that down and eventually your cow path will be a compost pile. It is more work to maintain a path for them than a road for vehicles. During dry weather walk them where you want a ditch.
When the wet weather comes the pat will fill with water. I have seen many hillsides rutted by the water fallowing the cow path. Observe, use or avoid to get the most benefit with the least extra input. If it were my cow walk, I would start with a parallel trench about 4 inches deep, just uphill from it, which from the photo looks to be between the walk and the tree, but I'm not sure one end heading as downhill as you can make it, crossing over the cow walk at the lowest point and extending beyond it.
If it requires starting higher than the tree and ending up lower than the walk, that may be how it needs to go, but no more than a 6 inch difference from beginning of trench to end of trench so that the high end of the trench catches that water that is on your cow walk. The trench takes precedence, and it might reroute the cow walk in a place or two, but Mother Nature isn't going to necessarily agree with where you want your pathway.
Dig it so that you can see the water moving as quickly as possible. Dig it when it's sloppy like that so you see the results as you dig. Then wait 30 mins or so and see if the walk doesn't dry out, and that the water stays in the trench, moving along it. It will take some gravel there, which doesn't hurt in any case, since it helps keep mud from getting on shoes and being tracked onto patios, decks, garages, etc.
Add to it as the vehicles press it down. Eventually it will stop sinking. If more than 4 feet of the driveway is lower and goes under water, a second trench parallel to the driveway, about a foot away, between the driveway and the French drain, will catch that water and send it in the same direction as the French drain. And, yeah, definitely extend that French drain beyond there, even if it has to pass back over the driveway to a lower spot.
If you put it there when it's dry, vehicles will shoot it off to the side, and it can even roll out from underfoot. So even though this wet time of year doesn't make it easy, it get the gravel pressed well into place and it will show you which sections sink the most and need more gravel. Cristo, Filling potholes only works if you have the right type of soil or bedrock. Where I live, we have clay 13 feet deep. I have tried it all. I can put rocks and pack with rock dust, even filled holes with concrete.
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Lots of people told me to dig ditches along my driveway, but since the ground is flat, they eventually fill up and flood the drive anyway or close enough that is soaks through to soften my driveway. Ditches are great if you can slop them enough that the water rushes out and keeps them from filling with sediment, but around here it is very flat, and the county pays a fortune every other year to dig them out again along all the roadways. Instead, I took that money I was going to spend for digging ditches and spent it on fill to raise my driveway, and lay knitted stone so I have zero maintenance for a few decades.
I just shake my head every other year I see the county come through and re-dig the ditches again. And the black top roads are sinking and cracking, and get flooded when the ditches fill up with rainwater. Brett, yeah, I know what you mean. I have an 8-foot clay base and when saturated even the 2" stuff sinks at first. I imagine your fill was not clay?
And how thick was your fill? Did you put fabric under it? How long ago did you put in your fill and how it is holding up? My rock driveway does need occasional additions, but fewer now than 20 years ago. Jamie and I may be in similar situations in that there is little or no summer rain, so the trenches and seeping water only happens in about a 4- or 5-month period.
A two-foot puddle isn't exactly as big an issue, compared to a whole roadway or driveway that is sitting on saturated clay. Here's what I did on the flat part that was saturated with seepage, even a week after rain:. Sorry, Brett, I reread your post, you did it 6 years ago and raised it 12".
Cristo, My fill dirt was mostly sand, which is terrible because it never gets real hard. Ever tried driving on the beach? I think clay fill or rregular soil would be better, but it really doesn't matter, because the method I am suggesting the fill doesn't do much besides raise your roadbed, and help dissipate the pressur. Think about if you were to build a road over a bog. You can just put down dirt and drive on it because you would sink in the bog. So you could build a bridge, with concrete piers and footings, but those piers would sink into the bog unless you had HUGE footings.
That is what I am doing. The fill dirt simply acts as a footing to dissipate the weight of your vehicle. But what keeps my vehicle from sinking into the sand base? See details above in my first post the 11th posting to this thread. So the ground under my driveway can get soft from long time standing water seeping through my subsoil, and when it rains, through my sand. But my vehicle never sinks because its weight is spread over such a large footprint by the time it reaches the subsoil, the psi load is very very small.
You can think of my 12 inch thick driveway as floating on the mud, although that isn't technically correct. I did not put a fabrick anywhere. Once the stone knitted very, very, very important , then I spread 2 inches of crusher run. I put it in at least 6 years ago, maybe 10, can't remember exactely, and it is as good as the day it was installed. I would never cut a ditch across my driveway or it would defeat the knitted stone and would start sinking again.
All my stones are very tightly packed and cannot move. Not much else matters. Here's another analogy that might help you understand what I mean. Have you ever seen those old Roman roads? The stone masons cut those large 12 inch stones to fit together very tightly. That is what I did with my 4 inches of 2-inch stone. If you put it down when your base fill dirt sand in my case is packed and dry, the stones will roll around a bit and after months of driving on them, and a few rains, the stones will settle with their flat side up, very tightly packed, just like a Roman road except with smaller stone and a LOT less work.
Since the stones are so tightly packed, there is a lot of friction between each stone and its surrounding neighbors, that the friction keeps it from sinking when my car runs over it. It is acting like a fabric, but is just packed stone. Brett, yeah, I learned to drive a stick shift on the beach, you let some of the air out of the tires! Just don't take your eyes off those rogue waves while your brain is trying to get the hang of where the clutch point is! Bad for the paint job and the engine compartment! Eventually the rock in the photo did stop sinking, so it packed together in some fashion, and it's stable.
But there are no open trenches on it. The photo just shows the layout of what worked as far as drainage coming from a seep uphill from that foot section. The perforated pipe is below the surface, and the ends are covered with screen that rodents can't chew through. But however many hundreds of kinds of clays there are would all react differently, so I guess the better we understand what soil we have, the more we know how to anticipate what it does.
Up a Rutted Road
I'm no soils engineer, but I am not sure about just any fill on just any native soil. I imagine there are many combinations that wouldn't be as successful as yours. Here follows the condensed form of a lifetime of road building experience in developing countries: You need to know what kind of subsoil is underneath your proposed road bed.
If you have sticky clay, or slippery clay, or expanding clay, or an old pond or lake then you are going to have problems. You can dump rocks for years on these soils and the stones will just keep sinking. What you need to do is build an "upside down road": Spread a 12 inch deep layer of SAND first. The sand will stabilize Jello-like clay subsoils.
In any area with unstable subsoil always spread SAND first. If you have really deep clay you might have to use 2 or even 3 feet of sand. Beware of hillsides next to roads. Hillsides collect vast amounts of water that can wash out your road. You need good ditches alongside your road. Swales should be not less than 8 feet wide and 2 feet deep lined with at least 6 inches of rip-rap.
This may seem big but is necessary to carry the volume of storm runoff. Install culverts any place water cuts across the road bed. This is necessary to prevent road washouts. The best time to inspect roads is during the rainy season or any time you get a big rain storm. Drive or walk the road and flag areas that need attention.
To build "rough" roads you need to use any convenient source of local stone. You also need 4 essential pieces of heavy equipment: A dump truck, a front-end loader, a grader, and a roller. Dig out the roadbed 3 feet deep. Fill with any kind of rock no matter what size. Just dig up rocks then dump them into the excavated road trench. Grade stones to level road surface. Roll to compact stones as best you can. Rough stone roads are not ideal but they are cheap, durable, and quickly constructed.
Look for sources of rock on your property. Calcium chloride binds dust to road surface preventing dust clouds from moving vehicles. If money is a problem, you can lay a temporary road: Dig out road bed then fill with 1 foot of rip-rap. Bind with crusher-run or rock dust as funds become available. Rip-rap makes for rough driving at speeds above second gear, but any road is better than no road. Any road less than 3 feet deep cannot be considered permanent. Use this as a standard for budget planning. I've been searching the site for a solution to our problem, and this is as close as I was able to find.
We inherited a very useful road on our new farm, but it was built on the side of a sand bank. This means, on the Pacific Northwest Coast, that during the rainy season water runnels dig trenches up to a foot deep. Building it on the side of a sand bank is not a choice we would have made, and now we're stuck with it. The rate of water flow through the sand means that the water collects and runs on the road, but also seeps out of the bank and adds significantly to the flow. We've tried digging ditches along the bottom of the bank, but the water flow becomes so significant and the sand so fine that it quickly silts and we're right back to square one.
There's also an intersection at the bottom of the bank, still on sand, which makes it impossible to just ditch it all away, anyway. Short of abandoning the road, are there any suggestions on how to prevent the sand road from getting so badly gouged in the winter? Oh shoot, you want something like this I think. The key to longevity is water bars that channel the water off the road and into rock check dams. We just got a 50 year storm with no erosion. I did not mean a little erosion, I had NO erosion. I built this road myself this summer using just my farm tractor and Wallenstein Trailer.
I do not have time to explain how I did it at this time, but here is the before and after photos. I LOVE open top culverts, and really debated using them on my road, but they just would not work well for this application. I bring this up so that people can understand why they are perfects for Hans but not for me. The key thing to remember here is that despite my heavy crown in my road, because of the steepness of it, water does not travel off into the ditch, but down the roadway.
As wheel ruts develop that will only get worse, so some means to get the water off the road occasionally must be done. Less of a grade would need less of them, and regardless, where these following methods are in place, they need to terminate where rock check dams slow down the force of the water. These water diverters can take on several forms. As Han's pointed out, U-shaped culverts made out of wood with pipe across the top to keep them from crushing inward does this.
They are cheap and easy to build, but tend to get filled with silt and stop working. They also get pushed up by frost action which can cause havoc when a plow comes through removing snow from the road. In short it will tear them right out. A better variation on this, but a bit more expensive, is a steel culvert with slots cut in the top occasionally that let in water. It allows a snowplow to pass overhead without catching, but is hard to clean out when it gets filled with silt.
Another great one for roads that are not plowed of snow is a rubber razor. It is simply a piece of rubber belting, 7 inches wide, bolted to a 2x6 and buried in the ground at a 15 degree angle. As the water runs off the road surface, it is diverted by the rubber razor and is channeled into the ditch and subsequent rock check dam. I would have built these too, but I had a hard time sourcing belting material, and it would have meant cost had I ripped one out when clearing snow with my bulldozer. Broad based dips work well which is what I used and can be seen in the photo , but they are far from perfect.
They are free since it means shaping of roadway surface material, but I am pretty sure when I push snow with my bulldozer, if the ground is not frozen, those broad based dips also called water bars will be bulldozed flat.