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.
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.
