Unearthing the Driveway

The Treacherous Step Exposed

It started out small, like most projects do.

People walking down our gravel driveway reach a downward slope where they have to step up and over. Loose gravel made that step perilous and we were expecting a hundred people for a backyard party. I knew there was some asphalt underneath, so I swept, shoveled and hosed a small area to reveal old but workable paved driveway surface.

Then our local community pitched in to pave East San Simeon. The blacktop looked so clean, I was embarrassed to have dust and gravel from our driveway tracked onto and defacing the new black surface.

So one morning, while still cool and the sun was barely above the horizon, I went out with a shop broom to where gravel meets new blacktop.

Blacktop meets old grey-top.

Optimism faded immediately. Sweeping was hopeless. I tried a shovel. Nothing doing.

The gravel was embedded over and within a thick layer of fine dirt that over decades had been compressed into a hard block, like caliche or hardpan clay. The hardpan was several inches thick. I needed to break it up with a tool.

Concerned about damaging the old asphalt, I started with a hand tool. I felt like an archeologist. It was way too much work for too little impact.  I needed something bigger, but not my iron pike. I started using my pickaxe.

I hacked away with the adze edge, gently or hard depending upon thickness, then shoveled the broken hardpan onto my screen and sifted gravel from fine dirt. The gravel I spread on our side driveway. The dirt I wheelbarrowed to several strategic sites. After about three hours of hard labor, I had put down a layer of gravel on the side driveway, created a large hill by the mailbox, but had cleared a only few feet of driveway.

Pickaxe, shovel & wheelbarrow, the screen behind my legs.

But those few feet were so pretty and so precious that I felt like I was unearthing sections of the ancient Appian Way. No one had known it was there.

I could keep up with the neighbors because I had a hardtop driveway. My pride bloomed. If I unearthed a few feet each day, soon I would uncover the original asphalt all the way to the bottom of the hill. That's only 150 feet.

In addition to aesthetics and history, the hard surface would increase runoff and direct precious rainwater to the acacia and palo verde trees in our little wash.

So it's been my hobby for the last six weeks or so, especially on a Saturday morning.  A few hours of carefully hitting and scraping with the pickaxe until the hardpan breaks off from the old asphalt surface. Then screen (dust everywhere), dump the gravel, and dump about four to ten wheelbarrows full of fine clay soil/dust. That's more than enough for a day.

Just one little, twelve foot section left.
It's the darker rectangle within the sun's glare.

The sun gets warm, I am sweating and dragging, and lizards are actively running around the yard. It's time to jump into the swimming pool than take a nap.

We had some rain a few days back, and that softened the hardpan to where I could just scrape it up with the shovel. Trouble was, wet dirt is heavy and hard to screen. What I gained in shoveling versus pickaxing (is that a verb?) I lost on my back trying to separate large gravel from sludge.

I suppose they make machines that do this in a few minutes. Maybe when we get rich and famous, we'll hire some guys to lay down some new asphalt. But until then, I managed to get some really good exercise and Jasmine the Wonder Dog, who never really liked walking on the gravel anyway so she'd walk on the cinderblock wall instead, can now walk on the driveway without any bother.

And I have these really neat large piles of dirt on the West side that I can form into terraces. But that's another project and another blog.

Sunset to the East

The sun, most everyone knows, sets in the West. Which is only one reason sunset on August 23rd was so spectacular.

These two photos were taken looking to the East and a little South.

The real reason this sunset was so spectacular is the size of the cloud that reflected the evening sunbeams.

It's impossible to capture the immensity in a photo. Imagine that it's your field of vision, this huge, glowing red cloud perched above and behind ominous dark clouds.

Then this red cloud gets bigger and bigger as it slowly moves towards the south, finally fading as the sun itself recedes lower below the horizon.

It doesn't take long.  Everything changes in just few minutes.