Maintaining Your Gravel Road

Image Gallery Step 1 : Set the blade to cut perpendicular to your line of travel and, working toward the uphill, level the bumps.

If a long stretch old driveway is all that connects you to the outside world, heed this author's tips.

Heavy rains, freezing and thawing, and the constant wear and tear from cars and trucks all take their toll on the gravel drive that leads to my place. The white-rock road runs nearly half a mile down one side of an Ozark hollow, across a stream, and up the other side—in short, the country it covers isn't exactly the best terrain for a driveway.

The road was built by a man referred to locally as "an artist with a dozer," a reputation he earned by being able to clear a path through even the stupidest of chosen routes without doing unnecessary damage. And the cost of the job he did for me indicated that the place I had chosen was plenty stupid. (It also suggested that the dozer operator could probably afford to change his name to Picasso and retire to the south of France.)

Considering the money I'd invested—and the funny habit we have of occasionally wanting to leave the farm for shopping trips and the like—I decided I'd better learn how to take care of our driveway. After seven years of trial and error, some reading, and a lot of talk with people who know their gravel roads, here's what I've learned.

MAINTENANCE BASICS

If you own a tractor (almost any size, other than the smallest yard and garden machine, will do), the only other tool you'll need is a six-foot, rear-mounted blade that's reversible and adjustable for angle and slope. A six-footer is best because it gets about half the road's width in a single swipe and still will cover the tracks of all but the biggest tractors. A blade much longer than six feet is hard for the average person to handle. If you don't own a tractor, try to borrow or rent one; the principles I describe here for keeping a gravel road in good shape will still apply if you're willing to do a lot of digging and raking with hand tools, but you'll be in for plenty of hard work, to say the least.

The first step toward successfully maintaining a gravel road is to realize that producing a smooth surface—the smoother, the better—is your ultimate goal. Undulations set vehicles bouncing up and down on their springs. The vertical forces generated, even though they may be too small for you to object to while riding in the vehicle, are then transferred back to the road. After enough of this bouncing activity, things eventually worsen until the road is nothing but a series of humps and gullies. Car travel on such passageways takes tremendous fortitude. (If you open your mouth to scream when your head hits the roof, you're likely to bite your tongue off when you're jammed back into the seat a moment later.)

The second step toward maintaining a gravel road, once you've decided to strive for a tabletop-smooth surface, is to accept the fact that you'll never be able to achieve that goal. Then make up your mind to go ahead and try for the impossible anyway.