Saturday, January 18, 2025 Guerneville CA.
Forest road work
I figured I had one more day prepping the old dirt road for rock, as far as using the bulldozer was concerned.
I rode on up through the state park and started up the bulldozer to warm it up and then rode the side by side up the road to where I hopped to park the dozer at the end of the day and then I walked back down the road to the warmed up dozer and got to work.
Springs
One of the biggest problems I have prepping the road is dealing with all the springs that pop out of the road and then run down the road, causing a mess which is what is happening on the right side of this picture.
No culverts please
I don’t like to use culverts in these hills as they are high maintenance and wash out during big rain storms. I find that ditches across the roads work better and don’t wash out if done right. I needed to work on this one a bit more to make it better. Sometimes it takes several tries to get these ditches right to keep the water from running down the road. I fixed that one up and will keep and eye on it especially during the next rain.
Don’t like ditches either
I don’t really like ditches either as they are also high maintenance and get plugged up with forest debris. But sometimes they are necessary, but I try to keep them as short as possible so as not to collect too much water during rain storms which also causes things to wash out.
I moved down the road to work on this piece of road. The ditch on the right is too deep and doesn’t let water run into the ditch from the road. The road needs to be sloped into the ditch so water will run into it during rains and I want a gentle sloped ditch so there is no maintenance and if a car runs into it, it isn’t a problem.
Prepped
This is what the road and ditch looked like after I was done working on it. Note the ditch is not deep and is sloped from the road so water from the road can run into it when it rains. The neighbors will pack in the road surface as they drive on the road to harden up the road surface.
Finished
I worked on a couple more spots just below that until I was finished using the dozer for the road prep. Now I can use the Skidder to finish prepping the road for rock and smooth everything out better to tidy up things, especially watching thing’s during the next rains which I hope aren’t too soon to give the neighbor’s time to harden up the road surface.
When I was done, I headed back up the road to the top of it where my side by side was parked as I’m done with the bulldozer.
I was going to fuel up the bulldozer but by the time I got to the top it was five so I left that for next time as I was tired out.
It’s good to have all the bulldozer work done on the rock prep work.
Nice day.
