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Build and Maintain Your Own Trails, Roads and Driveways

by Neil Shelton    

At least I ASSUME that’s the third way, I don't know for certain, because I am not personally acquainted with anyone who has the combination of ambition and free time that would be required to dig out a few dozen (or a few hundred) stumps set in rocky ground.  I guess if one were a Pharaoh or some such, one could produce that sort of man-power, but these days, even Pharaohs use heavy equipment.  

If you have a farm tractor and  something like a tine-cultivator, you may be able to pull out the very tiniest stumps yourself

So my advice is that if you have trees larger than 2” in diameter to clear from a roadway, you’ll need to hire equipment.  Most typically, this is done with a bulldozer, but in my experience, the best machine for removing the most trees in the least time is a track-loader.  For those innocent of construction machinery, a track-loader is virtually the same as a bulldozer, but instead of a blade in front, it has a bucket that can be lifted up high on the tree to achieve much greater leverage.  This will probably cost you anywhere from $50 to $100 per hour.  If you have less than 1/8-mile of roadway to clear, the most important part may be whether or not your machine operator insists on a minimum time for the job.  Most will want at least 4 hours before they’ll go to the effort to move their equipment to your site.

I've also heard of places where you can rent the machine and operate it yourself, but from what I've seen, folks tend to shy away from letting strangers climb aboard hundred-thousand dollar machines to have their way with them.  I know that the local Caterpillar dealer will do so, but you have to pay about as much as you would pay to get the operator and the minimum rental is by the week, so this probably isn't a viable option.

After you get rid of the trees, you’ll have a lumpy trail that a four-wheel-drive can pass over immediately, and after a few months of use, you might be able to get a regular car over it in dry weather.

Wet weather is quite another story.  Water is the ruination of roadways, and the sooner you’re able to deal with the seasonal precipitation in your area, the sooner your road will go from a trail to a driveway.  This brings us to…

Road-building Rule Number 2:  Get all rain-water off your road as quickly as possible.

Obviously, the only practical way to do this is with ditches.  You may have some spots where water can be drained from large pools with a pick and shovel, but if you’re trying to make a road that your in-laws will want to drive down in their Buick, you’re going to need heavy equipment again. 

Naturally, the equipment that does best at pushing out trees isn’t going to do such an efficient job of digging ditches.  That's how life works.  In most cases, the best way to dig ditches is either with a road grader or a small bulldozer equipped with a six-way blade.  These are not necessarily more expensive than large bulldozers or track loaders, but they are harder to find, and of course you have the daily minimum problem again.

Remember that the object is to get the water off  the road as quickly as possible so that it doesn’t become a stream, which will quickly cut a ditch of it’s own.  That’s why it’s a good idea to have the roadbed “crowned” while the ditching is being done.  This means that you make the center of the road a couple of inches higher than the sides, encouraging the water to flow into the ditches.  If your road runs along the top of a ridge, you may be able to avoid any ditching at all in many areas, but when you start to move up or down-hill, or across saddles, ditches are an absolute necessity.

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