From June 11 to July 16, 2023, I built a dry stone footbridge over a ravine in the forest near my house. Before that, from November 2022 to early April 2023, I cleared several acres of honey suckle (an aggressively invasive bush) from the old growth forest that surrounds my house. I then made a trail through the forest that looped around my house through the woods on the hillside and along the creek below. The trail passed over this ravine. The ravine had been mostly filled in decades earlier by the previous farmers who had owned the land. They dumped things like tractor tires, bedsprings, bottles, appliances, cans, fence wire, barbed wire and all other manner of trash into the ravine, not to mention dirt and rocks. I brought a Bobcat E60 to the edge of the ravine and dug out all the trash I could pull out and got the county to pick it up during the county-wide cleanup. Then I continued to dig rocks and soil out of the ravine. Once dug out, the trail was fully impassable, so I built a wooden bridge using 100 year old barn wood. However, I didn't leave the wooden bridge up long, and decided to go ahead with the arch stone bridge.
I took out the wooden bridge and placed it lengthwise into the ravine as scaffolding. I used the trunk of a maple tree to support the scaffolding. This maple tree had been at the top of the ravine but had fallen down over the site while I was clearing the hillside. Additional makeshift scaffolding was installed using old barn wood which was generally full of nails.
I laboriously hammered and beat a pickaxe against the bedrock of the ravine to prepare the foundations of the bridge (not pictured). Then I built and installed a wooden form which would hold up the work until the arch was complete. Beginning on June 5, 2023 I started drilling and splitting stones that came from the ravine and from the digging of the foundation of my house. The idea was to split out rough pieces that were about 10" deep but varied in length and thickness. I could have used nicer more reliable stone from another locale, but the local stone has a nice blue gray color to it and it was more of a challenge to use the material I could scrounge from the ravine, hillside, and foundation of my house.
The arch was begun on June 11 and completed on June 18. The actual arch work took about 16-18 hours of extremely physical work. I used a saw to rib (so I could chisel them easily) maybe 10-15 stones which needed a lot of thickness taken off, but mostly I used a carbide point chisel (Micon PKM25) and a heavy Trow and Holden chipper using a 4lb Trow and Holden bell hammer.
A week after the arch was completed, we experienced a damaging windstorm in central Kentucky. I lost power for 3 days. The next time I went out into the forest, I saw that a giant white oak tree had been felled by the storm. It lay right along the trail and had smashed into the bridge build. Neither the bridge nor the scaffolding could be seen at all. I thought may the bridge had been destroyed, but it was fine. Later I would discover that one of the arch stones had been smashed a couple inches into the arch form, but the arch was likely all the stronger for it.
After removing the tree, the rest of the build was fairly simple. I capped off the work with large stones that generally reached at least 18" into the build. Then I paved it with granite pavers and put red cobbles in a segmented arch pattern inside the pavers. This last piece is unfortunately not captured on the timelapse. Also not pictured is the removal of the scaffolding and the extremely laborious digging of the ravine after the bridge was complete.
24 июл 2023
