To fix a mud hole!

[strykerAKAmack]

Road fabric first , slotted culvert across sloped to low side , drainage gravel length of culvert 3 foot wide 6 inch high then covered with 3 foot wide non-woven fabric
frenchdrainman has culvert and fabric , good stuff dried my yard right up .
Then dump big stuff stone , rocks , dirt etc till close to hight then top off with shale .

 

[Robert walker]

This mud hole has existed for the entire 4 years I have owned this property. I have made half assed attempts to make it better by throwing bricks and cinderblock pieces in the tire tracks and when I am running through it once or twice a month with my tractor it hasn't been that much of an issue. Now that I have a SxS and run through it a lot more and I have done more damage to this area in the last month of SxS ownership than in the previous 4 years with my tractor. Time to fix the problem so it doesn't continue to get worse.

This is in a creek bottom area of my property that is swampy (obviously) and it floods 2-7 times a year depending on rainfall. So there is no real way to keep the water out of this area. Nor is it easy to drain as this is pretty much a low spot. Excess water does drain out one side of it and my goal it to help that process a long but there is only so much I can do there. The only real solution is to build it up. My plan is to use free concrete chunks to fill and raise the area so I am not driving through the mud hole. Luckily the mud isn't bottomless, it has a pretty hard bottom and the initial brick and cinder chunks help with that. Unfortunately, this is only an area that my tractor or SxS can get into. It would be a big ask to have a dump truck drive to back down there. So the majority of these concrete chunks will have to be placed by hand from the trailer I back down there.

My first course is rather large chunks of concrete lining the tire ruts. Next I will come back with smaller chucks to fill the voids and raise it up. And then finally I will use 3" chunks of crushed concrete as the final layer. I have a material yard next door to me that I get this stuff from for $20/ton and they don't charge me delivery. The 3" chunks I will have dumped at the top of the hill and will shuttle it down by the bucket with my tractor. I would LOVE to have a dump trailer to attach to my tractor but they are HIGH right now, not sure the budget can handle it. But it sure would make this project easier.

It is going to rain here for the next week so things will be on hold probably. In the meantime I would welcome and advice, questions, concerns, comments about this project that has been a long time coming.


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Rent a dump trailer for a month. I’d put the rock base in but then put dirt on top, once it compacts down the water would not be able to settle there if it’s high enough

 

[HawkinsHollow]

Rent a dump trailer for a month. I’d put the rock base in but then put dirt on top, once it compacts down the water would not be able to settle there if it’s high enough

Yeah, I like the idea of putting the dirt in the rock to hold it in place, that's the plan.

 

[aircommuter]

As a retired general engineering contractor I can tell you we have fixed many of those. You said it has a hard bottom, that’s where you start. You don’t need chunks of anything, that just allows water in. You need to excavate it to the hard surface and start building it up from there. Almost any material except clay would work. The material needs to be at 2% over optimum moisture, placed in 8” layers and compacted to a minimum of 90% R.P. You continue the layers until the grade is at or above the other areas. If it’s going to be a road then at least 6” above and crowned for drainage.
The use of structural fabric is to reduce the amount of properly compacted fill material needed. Even with fabric the typical fill would be 36”. Since you have a hard bottom you don’t need it. It’s use is often misunderstood.

 

[Bob Gibson]

I agree with aircommuter, but I would place a culvert across the road after excavating the mud and before putting in dry fill material to compact. That fill material can have larger chunks of broken concrete and rocks if necessary and place enough to get the road base up above the level it is naturally, then cover with whatever durable road material is available. The purpose of the culvert is to allow the water to move naturally and not just back-up against your crossing then flow over it, which would put you back at square one. Most gravel suppliers may have concrete grindings or asphalt grindings which can be compacted and may be cheaper than most road base materials.

 

[rScotty]

If you can fill it with earth until it drains off you might consider rerouting the road to better ground

Agree completely. Go with the flow. Move the road over and improve the banks to develop your nice little pond. Build the banks up and plant them. Leave access at one end of the pond for cleaning it out and enjoy the feature.
You are lucky to have it. We did the same and put up a camera and are astonished at all the animals that use our pond.

rScotty

 

[mx842]

There are many ways to fix a wet spot in a road but in my opinion using large hunks of concrete in a place like you have is not a good fix. If you were filling in 3 or 4 feet then yeah maybe but just looking at what you have those big chunks are alway going to be a problem. If you have a cinder block or brick plant nearby they usually will give you all you want you just have to haul them.

Regardless of what you put in a spot like that it needs to be placed starting at one end and bridged all the way through. Keep working your material forward and never get ahead of yourself. Never get a wheel or track into the the wet stuff always stay on top of the fill and keep moving forward using a fan like motion pushing the wet sloppy stuff ahead of you and off to the side. If you let one little patch of mud work it's way in and not pushed aside there will always be a soft spot there and the only way to fix it is to dig it out. It's usually best to start on the higher end and work to the lowest point but in some cases that's hard to do because of which end you are recieving your material from.

Once you get a good base that you can drive over then you can add 4 or 5 inches of crushed stone, something with some dust that will pack and hold together the larger material as well as seal off the top to keep as much water from seeping down through as possible. This is where I really love crushed concrete which is cheaper than crushed stone and does an excellent job in places like these. Once that dries and packs you'll need a jack hammer to get it up if need be.

The only way to really fix that mess would be to strip the mud off the whole road and fill the whole thing in to where it will drain because eventhough you may fix that one spot other ones are going to pop up all up and down your path. Oh another thing I might add it probably would be better to leave it alone in the rainy season and wait until the ground drys up because dry dirt is always easier to work than mud.

 

[bgr]

Looking at your photograph, you have a section of low, flooded road. There is a seepage of water entering in the left foreground and running down the road about a hundred feet to a spot where the right shoulder of the road is low and the water can run off to the right with some downhill drainage there. You say that you have found that there is a hard base under what seems to be two or three feet of decomposed leaves and organic soil which holds water and stays wet and soft. When you drive through, the wheels press the soil, make ruts and work the water up to the surface, leaving a puddle which is slow to dry.

If you had unlimited funds, you would hire a contractor to come in, remove the organic soil down to the hard base, put in 12 minus stone to raise the grade to just below ground level, top that with a 4inch layer of 5 minus stone to fill voids, but not completely, and then top with 4 inches of 3/4 screen road base material and crown it to make a road. The road would not be very porous at the base and it would dam up the water coming from the left and the water would go along the uphill side until it found a new place to cross the road. To solve the water problem, you would need to have a ditch dug along the uphill (left) side to a point opposite where the water drains on the right and put a culvert under the road at that point, emptying out where the water drains off to the right now. It is pretty flat and you might have to dig a drainage swale from the right culvert mouth.

The problem is expense and the remote location. It is not worthwhile to do that and run all the equipment in for a woods road. New England farmers faced the same problem crossing small seasonal streams to get to their fields. Especially when they did it in the 19th century with only horse and hand labor. They placed large stones across the stream or mudhole, usually about 18 to 20 inches in diameter. (They could skid those on a stone boat with a horse) The large stones had voids between them sufficient to have the water drain through. If 18 to 20 inches was not sufficient to get up near grade level they used larger stones or two layers of large stone. On top of these, they placed 6 to 8 inch stones to level the surface and fill some but not all of the voids. They wanted the water to flow through the road bed between the large stones which had forced their way down to the hard bottom of the stream and made a firm road bed. They topped the second stone layer with several inches of 1 inch stone or gravel to make a road bed. The result was a firm road which had many passages the water could flow through. The spring rains would scour the mud out from between the large stones and leave clear passages. They did have to clean the leaves and debris off the upstream side to keep the bed water passages from plugging up. Usually every 5 years or so.

You could do the same with what you have available. If cement, large 18 to 20 inch solid chunks would be good, spread a foot or two wider than the road. Then use 5 to 6 inch chunks to bridge the surface, and finally a layer of crushed 1 minus material. Be sure not to fill the voids between the large chunks at the base. Don't use cement block for the larger layers as it will crush to powder and plug the passages between the large stones in a few years. Especially if it freezes. Use block crushed only in the top layer if that is what is available. To keep the flow under the road open, ditch the uphill side and pull the leaves out of the ditch every few years. If you are pushing muck out of the way, don't push to the uphill side. It will wash back in and close the voids. If you have put in any wood chunks to fill the wheel tracks, pull them out as you go.

The main thing is to raise the road above the mud with materials large enough to extend above the mud, and don't fill the voids between them. MX842 describes a good method to spread. Just be sure you are not making a dam that no water will flow through. If you do that, water will pond up and flow down the uphill side to reach the next lowest place to cross over the road.

If you are short of material, come to New England and we can give you all the stones you need for free.

Hope this helps.

 

[beenthere]

This mud hole has existed for the entire 4 years I have owned this property. I have made half assed attempts to make it better by throwing bricks and cinderblock pieces in the tire tracks and when I am running through it once or twice a month with my tractor it hasn't been that much of an issue. Now that I have a SxS and run through it a lot more and I have done more damage to this area in the last month of SxS ownership than in the previous 4 years with my tractor. Time to fix the problem so it doesn't continue to get worse.

This is in a creek bottom area of my property that is swampy (obviously) and it floods 2-7 times a year depending on rainfall. So there is no real way to keep the water out of this area. Nor is it easy to drain as this is pretty much a low spot. Excess water does drain out one side of it and my goal it to help that process a long but there is only so much I can do there. The only real solution is to build it up. My plan is to use free concrete chunks to fill and raise the area so I am not driving through the mud hole. Luckily the mud isn't bottomless, it has a pretty hard bottom and the initial brick and cinder chunks help with that. Unfortunately, this is only an area that my tractor or SxS can get into. It would be a big ask to have a dump truck drive to back down there. So the majority of these concrete chunks will have to be placed by hand from the trailer I back down there.

My first course is rather large chunks of concrete lining the tire ruts. Next I will come back with smaller chucks to fill the voids and raise it up. And then finally I will use 3" chunks of crushed concrete as the final layer. I have a material yard next door to me that I get this stuff from for $20/ton and they don't charge me delivery. The 3" chunks I will have dumped at the top of the hill and will shuttle it down by the bucket with my tractor. I would LOVE to have a dump trailer to attach to my tractor but they are HIGH right now, not sure the budget can handle it. But it sure would make this project easier.

It is going to rain here for the next week so things will be on hold probably. In the meantime I would welcome and advice, questions, concerns, comments about this project that has been a long time coming.


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Bottom line.. find a way to drain the water away OR build up the road so it is higher than the swamp and proper draining away from the higher road. No other way to solve your muddy road. It is physics 101.

 

[mx842]

I went back and looked at those pics again and although it's hard to really see the whole picture but it looks to me like the general area is not like what I would term as swamp. Generally speaking swamps are swamps because the topo is flat and slow draining. Looking at the type of trees you have it looks to me that the ground does have some drainage and the place you are trying to fix just a low spot in the road from years of travel. Over time a small low spot in a woods road would stay damp and everytime you pass through that spot you take a little dirt with until you end up with what you have, a bigger hole that holds water pretty much all the time.
While I agree that large chunks of concrete would make good fill, they also make a mess if you put them in a spot like this because you don't have enough hole there to get enough good material on top of them to hold them in place. They will always walk or move around and eventually work their way to the top causing more wet spots.
I'll have to disagree with a few others here..........no offence mind you, about letting the water pass under the road through the cracks and crevasses of the large bace material. That's what ditches and colverts are for.
You said there is a good solid base there which is good I guess depending on what it is. Is it hard pan, clay or gravel? That material would determine how to best correct your problem. Clay and hard pan will hold water, gravel will let wanter water to pass through. Just looking at the pictures it looks like a light clay with a marble trace in that case you would want to use a little larger rock something like railroad ballast then top it with a crushed stone with plenty of dust to seal that off. With a gravel base you would do pretty much the same thing but with smaller clean stone for the base. Hard pan is a completely different story, water is not going to pass through it so lay your crushed stone with dust right on top of the hard pan but you will need to place some 4" drain tile down first about every 10 foot or so, cross ways in the road bed to allow a path for water to pass.
I guess it's primarily your call as to what you are willing to put up with in the end results. If it's just a trail you only use once or twice a year then keep on the way your going filling in spots with what you have as you get them. A more permanent solution will take more time and effort and would be better tackeled when the road bed is dry. One other thing a gravel road is never permanent, it's an on going job to keep it up and you'll need to add more top dressing from time to time because everytime you go down the road you take a little with you.