Contentment by design - Living - Places photo #1042

It has been lightly snowing this morning, with lots of fog, and the cloud cover is thick enough that it's actually quite dark. Then a portion of the cloud cover briefly broke right in front of the rising sun and everything was momentarily bathed in brilliant sparkly brightness, before being quickly cloaked in darkness again.
Wow, I love winter!

A bit more about this photo:

We have a really steep driveway. That means it's important to maintain the crown so that when it rains hard, the water runs off the driveway rather than down it, which can wash a lot of it away (those hard rains are called "gullywashers" for a reason!). That also means that every few years, I need to add a fresh layer of gravel to it in order to maintain the shape of the crown. (The roots of the vegetation in the center of the crown also help hold things in place during severe rainfalls.)

We use a special road base mix called Mountain Road Base, which contains a quite sticky, dark gray clay that clings well to steep driveways. It takes at least a full truckload to do this job, which is 12 cubic yards at about 1½ tons per cubic yard. I do this job by hand using 5-gallon buckets that are about ¾ full (many parts of the driveway are too steep for a wheelbarrow), which means I end up carrying tons of gravel up and down the driveway from the dump site alongside one part of the driveway. A big job!

Because of the forecast of a chance of rain and snow coming, I pushed myself really hard to finish the most important parts of spreading the fresh road base gravel yesterday, the fifth day I've been working on this project. I finished the steepest portion of the driveway, shown in this photo, which is the most challenging part to do (that bit takes about 100 buckets of gravel, which I think must be one of the heaviest things in the world!), as well as about twice that much on an easier portion of the driveway. I was almost comatose with exhaustion when I finished yesterday evening.

Road base is interesting stuff. After laying it down and raking it smooth, I soak it thoroughly and then drive on it to pack it down. Even after that, it remains a layer on top of the existing driveway. That layer is kind of fragile and can be easily torn up, for example, by the careless driving of a delivery driver. Once we've had a couple good, soaking rainfalls, though, it integrates with the existing driveway and becomes a very tough surface.

So you can imagine how happy I was when we awakened this morning to fresh snow, and it's warm enough that the snow on the driveway all melted in, which will help the new layer of gravel begin to settle and integrate with the existing driveway.
Woo-hoo!