End of season summary: 2016-09-30

We have completed the road work for this year.  Thanks to everyone who has participated this year.  This brief update to provide a link to a recent video showing the road work and a few notes:

Here's what we got done this year:

• Installed the culvert where a washout had occurred (this was 2016 work done early)
• Cover the previously repaired area with additional gravel at about 170 feet per load (estimating somewhere around 2" deep)
• Complete the hill repair and replace a wooden culvert on the outbound side of the hill [ditching done 2016-08-22]
• Continue the inner rebuilt section out through a wet-spot to the pit.
• We pulled a pile of rocks, some much larger that we could by hand.   This makes the road smoother in places and significantly reduces the bashed-bottom on shorter cars.
• filled the deepest pot holes with shale including a full load over one of the snow gulleys.
• ditching and grading in a few places to improve run-off
• extended the road outward from the top of hill section and wet spot out though the wet spot 4 and up the  hill on the far side.

We left some exposed shale in the potholes and the snow gulley to be efficient about the use of gravel.  Those are likely next-up in our planning for future years.

We built a beaver excluder to keep the culvert clear.  It's anyone's guess if the industrius little beggers will build a giat dam around our fence, but at least it won't be in the culvert.

We received and paid Darrell his invoice ($17,037,11)

I posted a high-def version of a driving tour.  You can use Vimeo tool while watching the link below to adjust the resolution appropriate for your device.

• Vide driving tour, end of year 2016 - enjoy.

We can all think about the work plan for comming years.  Some folks elected to contribute one year at a time so we expect a small budget for 2017 and a larger one again in 2018.  Let's all think about our favorite pot hole or area for improvement and we can chat it over a camp fire and come to agreement about our future plans.

The remaining work areas include:

• The road around the gravel pit hill between the two extended areas of new work.  We have started some grading and ditching on the inner end and pulled some rocks.  This likely needs more work to remain dry and hard and smooth.  Notice the widened area on the inner end - a dump truck pulled off there without sinking so it's more solid than it looks.
  • including the low spot where some puddles form
• The road out-bound from the outer section of new road.  There is more shale than gravel cover and the ditching should likely be extended further out and up that hill.  This leads on through
  • Patch 1: shale filled
  • Patch 2: shale filled
• Some pretty good road with a few low spots though to Flying Bear Pond
• The Flying Bear Pond causeway.  We patched with a bit of shale and we may want to do some more gravel cover and a bit of ditching or grading along that stretch.
• The outer stretch including the two Snow Gulleys and Patch 4.  We should think about covering that shale with gravel sometime in the next couple of years before it disolves.  There is likely more work to do along that stretch but the base is pretty solid so we should expect slightly lower cost per foot on that.

Hope this helps us all stay in touch with the road project.

Thansk, Bob.

Cost details for road work in 2016