Minnesota roads in spring

jon f mn

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

Had to drive to a friend's house today, bout 8 miles of gravel roads. Roads get like this every spring here. I might have to wash my truck this year.

 

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rrlund

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

Just wait for a rainy day and take it out on a paved road. That's what I did Thursday. She came out pretty clean.

 

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jeffcat

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

very nice two tone. Almost looks custom.

 

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Adirondack case guy

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

Looks like one of those Chip Foose paint jobs with the fade in color.
Loren

 

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Bill(Wis)

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

For a moment there, I thought it was the New Jersey Turnpike. But, on second look I thought, no, it's just too clean. (;>))

 

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chuck from neb

Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

Not any better in Nebraska

 

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Old weldor

Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

Here in my part of Iowa, we have lots of frost boils on the gravel roads this spring. I don't know what causes them but we had a lot of rain in early December.

 

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RBoots

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

People around here whine and complain if the roads look like that. Mostly citiots that move to the country,and people that have no idea how the world works, and how to live with a little frost on its way out.

Ross

 

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gene bender

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

So you think that's the only place roads are like that in spring. Every state will have roads that aren't paved or other hard surface.

 

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Spook

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

(quoted from post at 15:42:16 03/26/16) Had to drive to a friend's house today, bout 8 miles of gravel roads. Roads get like this every spring here. I might have to wash my truck this year.

Click to expand...

That road would be a huge improvement over what I travel on every day. One spring, you could not even get a 4x4 down some of our roads. Pure Michigan....

Decades of delayed / minimal maintenance.....

 

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flying belgian

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

It doesn't look like you have much of a crown on the road. That is a lot of the problem. Water won't drain off. Here in So. Mn. Belgrade twp. we had a grader operator that graded roads absolutely flat. If that wasn't bad enough, he graded the gravel to far off the side that he couldn't get it back. So their answer to that was use one of those shoulder re-claimers but they went to deep or aggressive and brought up the clay base and spread that across the road. You talk about a mess. So that grader operator retired and the new guy did an excellent job. Put a nice crown on the roads and really got them in good shape then covered them with gravel and always kept a nice crown in the middle. But after a couple years the town board fired him for grading the road the way he thought it should be and not following their direction. That's the reason they gave but in reality the supervisor just wanted to get his neighbor buddy to run the grader. The "good old boy" mentality is alive and well here in Belgrade township. This guy is keeping the crown on the roads but is again pushing it to far off one side or the other.

 

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dlbuck

Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

I live in southern Minnesota and our roads look pretty much the same way. Although it seems there are more frost boils then I remember and in places that usually never had any.

 

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Leroy

Well-known Member

• Mar 26, 2016

• #1

In my 72 years I have never heard the term frost boils. What are you talking about?

 

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Don-Wi

Well-known Member

• Mar 27, 2016

• #1

I've never heard the term frost boil before either, but I've got a good idea what they are after this year. The farm driveway has a spot that went soft this spring that has never been soft before that anyone can remember.

The driveway always gets a little sloppy in the spring, but it never gave like this. Another guy I bale hay for, his entire driveway is trashed. I stopped in one day, and he said that morning, he had 3 cars stuck in his driveway. I've got a part of my driveway that needs a little gravel. A full truck might be overkill, but I'll probably still just order a full truck and leave some on a pile for next time.

I am thankful though, that even the back roads around here are paved. No mud, no gravel, no problem. Once in a while the blacktop crumbles some, but I can drive a small sedan on it any day and not worry about getting stuck.

 

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D beatty

Well-known Member

• Mar 27, 2016

• #1

We use to have roads like that here in northern Indiana but they have paved most of them but now we have to contend with pot holes which I think are more of a pain in the neck than a muddy dirt road.

 

OP

OP

jon f mn

Well-known Member

• Mar 27, 2016

• #1

The frost forces water to the surface creating soupy holes. They can be large enough to fit an entire tractor in and feet deap.

 

T in NE

Well-known Member

Location

Cambridge, Nebraska

• Mar 27, 2016

• #1

Looks like Frontier, Red Willow, and Furnas counties if we get more than a quarter inch of rain.

 

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Brad Gyde

Member

• Mar 27, 2016

• #1

Although we were pretty lucky this year, we sometimes have a similar mess here in s.e. lower Michigan. I believe these pics were taken 4 years back around the first of March. We had been rather cold and got unseasonably warm what seemed like overnight. Most of the frost seemed to come out in about 2-3 days, leaving this muddy mess behind.





Spring thaw sure is awesome on our dirt roads!

Brad

 

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mnscruff

Member

• Mar 27, 2016

• #1

My father in laws solution to this problem was to custom order a dirt brown truck, rather than just wash it lol