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Build and Maintain Your Own Trails, Roads and Driveways

by Neil Shelton    

This was okay, when it hadn’t rained for several days, but when it was even slightly damp, the fresh red clay that the bulldozer had exposed assumed all of the properties of axle grease except color.  Attempting to pass this section with a two-wheel-drive was nothing short of madness.  With 4WD, the situation was actually worse, because now you could PROBABLY get across this stretch without sliding sideways into the barbed-wire and over the edge of the embankment into the neighbor’s field so we had a tendency to take the chance.

Well, remarkably everyone lived through that period, which lasted for a few winters due to our perpetual lack of funds and our boundless, home-grown naiveté. 

What I’d like to suggest to you is that you don’t have to live with conditions like that.

If you have home roadway problems, they probably can’t be fixed for free, but they can be cured, or greatly alleviated, on a reasonably modest budget.

Let’s start out with the very basics: suppose you have a stretch of woods through which you want access.  In most forests, if you look very carefully, you’ll be able to find some trace of old logging trails through-out the property.  Look along ridge-tops and at the highest points of any given location and you may see slight indentations of wheel tracks or simply long stretches where a cleared arbor through the woods can be seen.  Loggers tend to put their roads in places where water will run away from either side.  If you’re lucky enough to find a trail that, sometime in the past, has been used quite a lot, there may still be an obvious path, even to the untrained eye.  Wherever this is the case, you can have a passable trail in a few afternoons with just a little chain-saw work.

It’s unlikely, though, that your old trail will follow the exact path that you want to use for your modern ingress and egress, so you’ll probably have at least a few yards that will need to be wrestled away from previously untamed areas. 

This is where lots of people make their first big mistake: they cut all the trees and brush out of the new roadway, figuring that if they cut the stumps low enough, they can tolerate them until they rot out naturally.

I’m not certain how long it takes a few dozen stumps to rot away, because I followed this plan on one of my trails about 25 years ago and most of my stumps appear as strong and sound as they did then, so, just to be sure, allow yourself 50 or 75 years, especially for the more rot-resistant species.

While I was making this mistake, I also made the companion error of thinking that I could have these stumps bulldozed out later when I had more money.

This brings us to:

Road-building Rule Number 1: You cannot push out stumps with a bulldozer.

Well, not unless you are dealing with some very small stumps and a very large bulldozer.  Bulldozers are able to push down large trees easily because of the leverage they get by pushing on a point eight or ten feet up on the trunk.  

However, stumps, by definition, have no trunks and no trunk equals no leverage.  So, after you’ve cut down the tree, the only practical way to remove the stump is to dig it out. 

Basically, there are three ways to do this: 1. you can dig them out with a bulldozer, but this is very expensive. 2. you can dig them out with a backhoe.  This is somewhat less expensive, but not cheap.  The third way is to dig them out by hand. 

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