Maintaining Your Gravel Road

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Arrive at the work site in the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun is low and the shadows are long enough to emphasize any humps in the surface. If you examine the terrain, you'll find that there is almost always a hollow just uphill from every bump. That's because, as vehicles crested the bump, their wheels became "light" and lost traction, spun, and dug a trench on the uphill side.

One basic principle of gravel-road maintenance, therefore, is to work always toward the uphill, in order to fill in those trenches.

Set your blade to cut, and adjust it so that it's perpendicular to your line of travel. The blade should also be sloped slightly, using the adjustment on your tractor's hitch arm, so that it cuts a little deeper at the edge of the road than it does in the middle.

Now go ahead and start grading. Tearing into that surface, when you've paid so much for gravel and waited so patiently for everything to pack down, will be scary at first; but trust me—this approach will produce a better, smoother drive.

Work each half of the road, always remembering to grade uphill. Then, once you've cut down all the bumps, turn the blade so that it will drag, rather than cut, and angle it to pull material into the center of the roadway. In other words, turn the blade 180° from its original position, plus one adjustment stop. And again, slope the blade slightly so that it will touch the outermost edge of the drive just before it contacts the middle.

Drag each side of the road several times, still working toward the uphill. In places where, in the previous step, you cut the top from a goodsized bump, windrows of gravel will have been left by the square-running blade; be sure to catch these piles and move them to the center. It usually takes me two such passes to stir things up and get the gravel redistributed to my satisfaction.

Of course, by pulling the gravel to the middle of the road with the angle and slope of the blade, you'll create a crown. There's some disagreement about the need for crown on a road, but in my experience, a surface with a modest hogback sheds running water to the sides more quickly, and thus reduces down-the-road erosion. Besides, the center of the drive makes a good place to store any excess gravel that you scrape up. It sure beats leaving the crushed rock to spread slowly outward into adjacent pasture, forest, or lawn.

I leave a crown of no more than one foot, total. The best rule is this: The steeper the road, the more crown required to shed water to the sides. Drives on a flat terrain require very little crown . . . just enough to keep them from puddling up.

If pulling gravel to the middle has created too high a ridge or a big, loose gravel pile running down the spine of the road, a single swipe with the blade in its reversed, non cutting position should sweep the right amount of material back into the tracks where wheels will run. For this operation, set the blade perpendicular to the drive and crank the adjuster on the hitch arm until the blade runs level.

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