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Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Road Rage...

We live in an area where there's no maintenance on the rural roads. The state takes care of the main route, Chena Hot Springs Road, but the borough only accepts roads that are up to their current standards. The subdivision is so old that the roads would need expensive upgrades and no one is willing to contribute. So we do the work ourselves, though the condition often varies from mediocre to not so good. One neighbor, who's a heavy equipment mechanic, got a road grader into his shop for repairs. After fixing it, he apparently called a friend of his who's supposedly a retired operator, and told him to "check it out and maybe fill some potholes." So the guy took it upon himself to re-grade the whole two miles of subdivision road, pulling the ditch material up on the road to re-crown it. While this works on well maintained gravel roads, these hadn't been graded in 20-30 years. So what he pulled up was mainly silty muck and occasional cobbles and boulders, probably  left there by the original contractor in the '70's. The road became an obstacle course, trying to avoid the cobbles and boulders while not getting stuck in the mud. Great fun.
So eventually another neighbor got a friend of his to come by and regrade it again. Though he did the best he could, getting most of the muck and rocks off, it's still real slimy when it rains and the ditches are now filled up with muck. Most of the neighbors are pretty upset, they call or stop by to complain, but what can you do, sometimes shit happens, so just move on. Since they don't do much, I've been cleaning up the worst spots with the tractor and rear blade, then installed the backhoe and started digging out the ditches.
Re-digging the filled-in ditches. Tried to keep them shallow so the neighbors that drive too fast don't get stuck when they slide off the slimy road.

Also filling in the the dog yard holes. This is the same spot in the third photo of previous post "Is It Fall Yet" (9/16/18). Used to hand shovel these holes back in the day, but now the hydraulics rule.

2 comments:

  1. I bet that stinks trying to ride a clean bike down that road.

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  2. It'd be pretty hard to ride anything now without knobby tires. Rode a few times when it was drier and only had one oops, but made it through without falling. Since we've had some rain and snow, which melted, it's a real slimy mess, so the bikes are parked for the winter!

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