CoolTop Eco-Resort

This first photo shows what a "good part" of the original access road looked like. I say good because it wasn't washed out but other parts were.

We quickly realized that an all-weather, any-vehicle access road was going to be a requirement. After getting permission from MARENA, we started the job of building a real road. While mechanized equipment was a possibility, we went with a more traditional approach. It combined a lot of laborers, recycling and some cement as the glue to hold everything together.

The technique is to prepare the roadbed, add cement gutters and cross-road low spots (called vados), place rock on the roadbed and cement it in place. Our neighbor Don Rosa had a lot of rock in his fields that he would like to get rid of so that is where the recycling came in.

Workers hauled the rocks out of the fields and down to the road where they were loaded into an old Mercedes 5-ton truck and hauled to where we needed them. The rocks didn't come in "perfect for road building" size so many had to be broken up with a sledge hammer.

The next bit of recycling is that some trees had been blow down in a recent windstorm. A bit of wood in needed in the preparation of the gutters so we recycled the trees to supply the needed wood.

Next came the vados. As a vado is a dip in the road surface to allow water to cross, you have to dig deep and wider than the road and fill in the space. This was a chance to use the bigger rocks.

The finished vado is then made by cementing over the rocks. You also need to cement a wide enough part such that the water cannot work its way under the edge of the vado. Lots of work and lots of cement so the good news is that we only had to do this in four places.

Next comes the gutter. It is dug down deeper than the road bed and the top surface is concrete rather than rocks embedded in concrete like the main road surface.

The vertical part of the gutter is made by using wood forms and then building a cemented-in place rock wall. That is then finished with concrete.

The finished road complete with a gutter on one side looks like this. Clearly, you will have no problem driving in to the facility anymore.

For those of you who are wondering how many people it takes to build a road like this, this photo gives you a clue. Missing from the photo is Lester, the guy in charge of getting the work done and, well, in charge of taking the photos too.