Patching persistent potholes on gravel roads.

Patching persistent potholes on gravel roads.

My tenant Randy has many years experience fixing gravel roads with his excavator. Quite often, a road will develop potholes. The owners fill in those potholes with small gravel and in short order , vehicle traffic spits out this gravel , before it has a chance to be compacted enough to stay put.
.....
This is Randy's method. It works. He starts off by putting in 1 1/2 inch crushed gravel. This material is mostly large chunks but there are some smaller chunks as well. Sifted pit run gravel that has not been crushed , will tend to not stay put. After this gravel has been driven on for a month or so , it will be really well packed. At this point, a new layer of 3/8 inch road base will be raked around on top. The largest pieces in this are 3/8 of an inch, but there is lots of material much smaller, going right down to stone dust. As the road is used , more fine material will fill the gaps. I had patched the road with the wrong type of stone on several occasions. New potholes developed within a few weeks. When Randy makes a patch, it stays there.

My road is made of natural gravely mountain soil. The only gravel purchased for the entire kilometer of road, is the material for patching. We occasionally remove larger nuggets, if they form a bump. Most of the material is fine enough to make a suitable road. Even in the middle of a torrential rain, most areas of my property are drivable.

I lived for years with a 3/4 mile long dirt driveway in rural Georgia and we discovered by trial and error that the best way to deal with mudholes was to throw rubble into them first. Bricks, old concrete and blacktop chunks, cut-offs of treated wood, etc.; and then follow this with gravel of whatever sort, on top of and around the larger chunks. The gravel "locked in" the other stuff, which if left there by itself would often tip up on edge and every which way when driven over in the wet and leave a worse mess than before. The rule at our homestead was that no vehicle that left came back empty, and several large plastic landscaping pots were kept in each vehicle for filling with rubble and gravel from an array of previously located "scrounge sites" in the nearby towns......