Everyone has different transportation needs and levels of comfort on rough driveways, or roads. Last week, our driveway screamed for attention through unfortunate circumstances. There really isn’t a road budget available in our finances this spring, so I’m trying to make lemonade from the lemons (ruts ) in the road with sweat an no money.
The Incident
We have been driving in now for a month now, and don’t really expect any driveway adventures until the weather changes things this fall. We had a real soaker of a rain storm stall over our area for a full day last week. So much that I was suprised on the way home to hit some “greasy” (muddy) spots that night. Even had to put the rig into 4WD to take the challenge out of that night time trip. We had just picked up my car from the shop and Jackie was behind me that night.
I got to the house and thought she was behind me, but I waited and waited. Then my phone rang. She was stuck, drats! She discovered the hard way, that her 4WD was not working, and slid backwards into one of our deep ruts.
The Predicament
The spring time budget for transportation/driveway repairs went into new tires for both rigs. Any hope of renting anything other our homemade road grader was out of the question. Even trying to purchase a dump truck of gravel to fill these ruts is impractical, because they are too long.
Most of the places with ruts are areas that have about four feet of ancient volcanic ash. This ash, or dust in the summer, is what we live on, and tried to grow stuff on once. I recalled a former neighbor telling me how he nearly lost a bulldozer in this stuff one wet spring. He said you could keep packing stuff in year after year and it would just disappear.
The Solution?
So I’m trying an experiment on some of the bad ruts this year. My son and I started today. Since a wildfire went through the area 15 years ago, I have a good collection of 10 foot long poles from 4 to 6 inches in diameter. 
These poles aren’t rotten, just not cut down to size for firewood yet. We started packing the poles into the ruts.
This is much quicker than hand digging and filling them with more dirt that goes soft in the next rain. I’m hoping when we drive over them with the rigs, it will embed the logs securley into the ruts. No getting high sided in ruts anymore? I hope. Maybe it will help save the front end alignment too.
You might ask, “what if the wood breaks up and punctures your tires?” Hope not. I’m giving this a try partly because we have new sturdy tires. The poles are smooth without branches or stubs that might produce puncture problems.
What do you think? Have you tried this before? Have I overlooked something? Tell me why this will or will not work in the comments below!
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Corduroy roads was a fact of life for many pioneer communities. This was essentially a road surface constructed from logs laid across the road surface as a surface layer to resisted rut formation. I have seen these century old corduroy layers come to the surface as the roads bed was dug up in preparation for building a wider and improved road. For the most part these logs were substantially intact after having lain in the ground and covered by gravel these many years. As long as water does not run along the length of the logs carving out a channel your repair should last many years. Laying the logs at right angles to roadway direction prevents crowning in between the wheel ruts. This idea may be of use later on when doing further repairs.