Wednesday April 23, Guerneville CA.
Road work
With our seasonal rains mostly finished for the year, I’m able to make some real progress getting stuff done on this job, after a real wet winter that really slowed me down. On a good note, with all the rain, I was able to find all the real bad spots in the old road and repair them, one by one, so this will be a very good old road when I’m done working on it.
I’ve arranged to get some rock hauled by the state park dump truck, so I want to finish enough stuff off so the guy can drive the heavy loaded dump truck up and down the road without getting stuck.
Water crossing
This water crossing needs some work as the water isn’t running off the road properly. I plan to dig it a bit deeper and roll it out some more to make it easier for low cars to get across it. I plan to put some rock in it to make sure it doesn’t turn to mud.
Here’s another view of the water crossing showing how shallow it is. During a heavy rain storm, there’s lots of water that will cross the road here so it needs to be constructed to take that and not wash out.
Culverts
It turns out that the state park has lots of new culverts I could use, but I want a low maintenance road so will not use any of them. In general, people use too many culverts that aren’t really needed which just makes for a high maintenance road when it doesn’t need to be. I would use a culvert, it I really needed one, but these crossings don’t really need culverts. It’s not like there are creeks that run all year long.
Getting to work
I continued on up the hill to where Skiddy was parked and got it warmed up and went to work on that crossing.
I got that water crossing all finished up then moved to the next spot. I put the extra dirt on the edge of the road to build up the outer part of the road in this spot. It’s the outside of the road and not a part that one drives on, unless maybe, when two cars meet and have to pass each other.
Another old road
There was another old road that takes off from this road. A lot of the water from the main old dirt road washed down it originally and caused a lot of erosion debris to wash down into the park, so I needed to repair the damage on it and get that old road opened up. There were a lot of old dead trees that had fallen across that road over the years, so I worked on clearing all the debris off it. These were some of the old trees across that road. These are all across that road and I’m pushing them down the road and then off it. This kind of work is a lot more fun than hauling rock all day long.
I worked on that until the fuel gauge warning light came on and had to quit for the day.
Nice day.
