Roads

ELG is built around 2 miles of gravel road, all constructed in 1974 or earlier. Besides the obvious equipment and labor issues, there are a number of challenges to maintaining our roads:

• Traffic is way up from 1974, so a lot of gravel is ground in or kicked off the road
• Many road sections are steep, so erosion and washboarding become problems
• Many road sections flood often, softening the road surface and washing gravel away
• The price of gravel is rising faster than inflation

This Google Terrain view of ELG sums up a thing or two. What we call Baer Hill is not a hill as much as a ridgeline. The church camp, Minka Farm and other places north of the power cut are all on a plateau. Baer Hill is the southern dropoff of that plateau.

The power cut and all the ELG Road tracts are on a "level" between the plateau and the "bottom" at Cane Creek and Lindsay Tapp's pond. So every drop of water that comes off the camp, Minka Farm and their neighbors, bound for Cane Creek, has to cross ELG Road. As more houses are built up there, more water will run off.

Pond Road, Baer Hill Road and parts of Red Tail Run all traverse the ridgeline at fairly steep angles, even though the ridge is not that high.

This graph of gravel price vs. inflation over time is adapted from http://dnr.mo.gov/geology/geosrv/geores/indmin/sandgravel.htm

Tools and techniques

Ideally, our roads should have a crown in the center, graded to ditches on the sides. This diagram is from the Maine PDF below.

Most of our roads are far from ideal. Shadowwood is pretty good, except at the "Nile delta" where it meets Red Tail Run. Red Tail Run east of Jack&Lori's driveway is pretty bad, with high berms and wheel ruts lower than the uphill ditch. The difference is maintenance load. Shadowwood drains well and takes little gravel. Red Tail Run has had erosion issues the last few years.

ELG Road is shaped pretty well in most places, but has at least two places that wash out regularly.

It's all good enough for now, except for the persistent roughness on Baer Hill, but can be improved over time to use less gravel and head off big future repairs.

These are the tools at our disposal:

• Grading, with Larry's compact tractor, or bigger equipment rented in
• Compaction
• Drainage
  • Overflow Bypasses
  • Geotextiles
  • Concrete Pavers

Overflow Bypasses

There is one driveway on ELG Road where the ditch regularly overflows, even in moderate rain, washing gravel into the woods. It should be possible to fix that by making a low spot in the road and filling it with large flat stone, which will not wash away, up to the normal level of the road. This diagram is from "A Guide For Forest Access Road Construction and Maintenance in the Southern Appalachian Mountains," file WQ0214.pdf below.

Other Resources:

• Larry's Road Blog
• ELG Road info at Larry's work website