Build and Maintain Your Own Trails, Roads and Driveways

Without question, one of the very handiest things you can own when you live in a rural area is a four-wheel-drive pickup. Your livestock, your income, even your health and safety can all depend on your ability to stay mobile in all weather, so having at least one 4WD vehicle can relieve you of a lot of unnecessary stress.

Having said that, you'll find that after a few weeks of enjoying your omnipotence over all sorts of terrain, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that it is often nice NOT to need 4WD, especially for everyday events like trips to town, or up to the highway to get your mail.

That’s when you start to pay attention to the condition of your driveway and access roads.

Trust me, I know about this stuff.

When we first moved to this old farm, the only access to pavement was by two miles of county road. Actually, this wasn’t so bad, since even though this road was rocky and full of pot-holes, the county was responsible for maintaining it, so it never really got THAT bad.

However, it never got any shorter either, and after a time, we began to eye an old log trail through the back of our place that wound through some pretty formidable terrain, but managed to access pavement in less than ¾ of a mile, since there is a state highway that adjoins our back boundary.

One day, when a much-too-small bulldozer became available to us, we reopened that crude, intermittent log trail and converted it into a crude continuous log trail that took us all the way from our back porch to the highway in less than half the distance, with a fraction of the road dust and without having to drive past the homes of any of our decidedly nosy neighbors.

We had those things during the very finest of weather, that is. The trouble was, we did the work in early fall, and the winter that followed did not offer us up the very finest weather on very many occasions.

The road wasn’t so bad for the first quarter-mile, but then came a section where the old log trail had, for a few hundred yards, crossed the fence over onto the neighbor’s property, so we had to blaze a new trail along the base of a hill that was perpendicular to the direction of the road.

It also sloped decidedly to one side, the side with a barbed-wire fence along it’s edge.

Home 1 2 3 4 Next

Hit Counter