The smoke from nearby forest fires kept us indoors for a week. After that, the rain began. At first, it was welcomed because it was mitigating the smoke and putting out the forest fires. Unfortunately, the rain continued until it wore out its welcome. We had been making decent progress on the driveway at our farm site, but we were at a standstill for more than a week. Finally, though, the rain ended and we quickly finished the corduroy base for the driveway at our farm site.
As I mentioned in the 6/1/24 post, the ground here has discontinuous permafrost and is nearly frozen elsewhere. If a driveway is constructed simply by scraping away the ground cover and pouring gravel on the dirt, it doesn’t last long. Heat transfers to the ground, warms it up, it softens or melts, then the gravel sinks in. The process repeats until the gravel is effectively gone.
To delay or prevent the problem, we have to do things a bit differently. For one, rather than scrape away the ground cover to reach the dirt, we have left the ground cover intact. There is a thick layer of moss, roots, and decomposing wood covering most of the area. It is a pain to cut through so leaving it in place was an easy choice.
The second thing was to build a corduroy layer to serve as the base for the gravel. As we have cleared the property, we have stacked all the trees we have cut. Most are black spruce under 3” in diameter. To build the corduroy base we laid the smallest trees parallel to the driveway path. The largest trees were limbed and laid perpendicular to the path.
A layer of Typar will cover the corduroy and mine tailings will be spread over that. Typar is a geotextile used in road building. It allows water to drain through, but will keep the rocks from settling through the corduroy layer.
We have informed our contractor that the base is ready and are awaiting a delivery date for the tailings.
I am enjoying seeing this process. It makes the whole idea more easily understood.