Grading a dangerously steep driveway

it's right here oh it came off 100 miles away from anywhere our driveway access now is completely blocked off [Music] all right guys well here's today's challenge we've got a super steep driveway and it's pretty fairly loose materials um and what we're going to be tackling today is we're going to be doing a temporary fix before we do the permanent fix so right now we've got a kind of a narrow pinch point down here and what we want to do is we want to get this all graded out so that she's safe to look if we look at it right from the bottom here you can see that we got a really steep pitch even the four-wheel drive trucks have a difficult time climbing that hill so we're going to alleviate some of that pitch today by filling in some of this widening this out so that we don't go over the edge if we do but then we're going to be looking at a couple different ways that we can do a permanent fix on this and make a driveway that you just don't have to ever worry about again we're going to be talking about that today while we get this job done so this first thing we're going to do is just dive right into the skid loader and start smoothing out some of these nasty grades just trying to get it to get it so that we can finally start to see what kind of materials we have to work with our goal is to not import anything but to just use what we have available on site sometimes that can be challenging sometimes a challenge is actually the fun part so let's go have fun all right today it's just gonna be a temporary fix on this driveway next year i'm [Music] i want to create a nice flatter area up here as well to harvest some soil from up top and then try to blend everything down together basically i just want to start shaping at this point and see what i got i want to get a feel for what this material is like and what the material below this material is like just because what i'm working with here is one way it doesn't mean everything's going to be the same and what i'm finding is it's super sandy over there which sucks let me take that back easy to terraform very easy to terraform just hard to get it to stay that way after a heavy rain easy [Music] take out this ridge at the top i take off the top bridge that means my driveway approach is less up here because i also have less flat zone on top but i can move the flat zone over to a different area the grade is definitely too high by this building which is not a bad thing because it allows me to use that dirt where i need it [Music] so that's great these rings are all ready ah nice easy to think too deep look at pushing this down to the lower part now we want to bring the lowest part of the driveway up we've got this breaker so where we got the wrinker do we're gonna fill that up and that's gonna eliminate a right there simple little things man it doesn't take a lot sometimes sometimes just looking at it going why do you have a dip in your driveway why do you have this why don't you just move your driveway over five feet create an s-curve or angle it across your property but if you're not in the industry it's easy [Music] okay this sucks i got a massive pile of dirt that has to go down the hill and i just sprung a leak oh my gosh look at this this fitting we just put a new o-ring in but you know we put in a redneck o-ring which basically means we did the best we could but oh my god we're losing a lot of hydraulic oil figured it must have out one of these hoses right here oh it came off the hose keeper broke oh snakies crap okay 100 miles away from anywhere our driveway access now is completely blocked off and we're leaking oil okay so what we're gonna do is we're gonna do the rest of this as fast as we can while we keep one eye on this and try not to go into the side ditch what that basically means is as i'm pushing this soil down i'm going to try to do it in as few moves as possible so it ain't going to be pretty but it's basically a race against how much fluid do i have because i got a lot of work i got to get done oh god i don't think i'm gonna be able to do it that's freaking just pouring out i got zero hydraulic fluid here zero zip zero zilch unless it was sprayed up look it's up here right in here right here here we go yep right there okay yep yep yep unless there's some dirt stuck in here yeah there's a lot of dirt a lot of dirt come on come on come on i can't even see where the the pivot is oh man where's the ball there it is so when you're when you go on it's not everybody knows about these hydraulic lines but what my plan is i'm going to detach this one because it's not hooked up it can't leak but i'm going to try to wrap this cord around that way if we stop leaking we can keep working right i'm actually going to leave this one hooked up so you get it rotated around then you pull the sleeve back and then you should be able to pop it off unless it's under a lot of pressure [Music] oh crap oh man there's a lot of dirt in there all right got that down i got that down this should stop leaking now okay [Music] you guys are getting greasy it's a good sign that you're actually working though thankfully we've got this grade at least not right but it's not wrong when i say it's not right it's not wrong it's not finished it's a far it's far from finished but at least it's smooth enough that we can get equipment up here and work over the winter before frost it's been we've already had three three snow storms so next phase is bringing the soil down here and widening out this driveway we're gonna be pushing all that down i think we're gonna go this way with it yeah i think we'll go this way we got a culvert opening i don't have an extension so we're gonna it'll be a pinch point right here but if i got enough dirt i can bring some on this side i don't have enough dirt that's not the worry poor part anyway if i can get this side fleshed out formed down and built up that'll cut the top off and just make it easier to come down i think that's what we'll do all right let's hope let's hope we got enough hydraulic fluid left we may have leaked too much to even accomplish that at this point [Music] all right let's just check out how we've done so far i took a little bit of the soil from up there i cut this down this is not the finished finish game plan eventually what i'm going to do is bring the driveway that way i'll take some of this topsoil right here spreading grade this over but this this allows me to cut get up and down right now and here we go i mean we're we're in pretty decent shape this driveway's much easier to to manage the first time i walked up this driveway i had to grab my uncle's hand and pull them up because it was so steep now you can just walk up and down like it's no big deal use the organic material on the top because that had a little bit of a clay binder and if it reestablishes some vegetation that'll stitch that soil together but i think she's i think she's a good temporary fix on this one and the ultimate game plan will be to take that driveway carve it right over there and then to grab it right up into that part of the road and then you then we'll have a virtually flat driveway coming in and out and that just means that i've got to grab some fill from other places and carve it through but that'll be a long-term game plan that's one option option number two is to bring in about six feet of fill and just come right off the road and up to here that would be a very straight short driveway so a couple different ways to to skin that cat but that's it for this one today hope you enjoyed it i hope you hit that like button and i hope you subscribe and tell a couple of your friends and that's all we got for you today thank you guys much appreciated for coming along for the ride i love projects like this i just love coming in here and just going what can we do i hope you do too if you do that's the kind of thing let me know god bless you guys go get them we'll catch you on another one