Daylight Basement / Road Building Material

[rick91351]

Tossing this out from our two year ago project at the ranch.  For those that are lucky to have a granite hill side you might want to build on, or a daylight basement, a berm house or underground.  The excavated materials is great for roads. 



That barrow site as my excavator calls it graveled all this and more.  It is hard not to use it for something.  But it is a long ways from where we want to build and our septic tank. 

[Don_P]

Ahh... rotten granite, nice stuff to have. Growing up we called it Chapel Hill gravel, it came out of a large old quarry that was also the Y swimming hole at the time. I think they have since gotten themselves one of those cement ponds. The flanks of some of the mountains in what is truly the "blue ridge" are made of this excellent aggregate.

[rick91351]

We are a little more refined here.      It is referred  to as decomposed granite.  99% of the unpaved mountain roads in this state are of that aggregate.  If you can get it laid down and smoothed out with a blade and get one good wet winter on it.  The next spring it is good and tight.  Or that is our experience. 

[Don_P]

I'm on the flanks of one of those blue ridge mountains I mentioned. The rock under me is metamorphosed granite and the second oldest in the Appalachians, it is still very strong stone in most places. Read that as, I've been battling a few house sized boulders for years  . Between the top sandy clay layer, fully decomposed granite, and the full hard granite, is sometimes a thin layer of good rotten granite. My local roadbuilding material is either from the shale pit on top of the mountain, a metamorphosed sedimentary layer, or I get crushed granite hauled in.

Where I'm working 6 miles away just on the other side of the nat'l forest is completely different. It is 600 million years younger and was ancient seabed. We are doing the stonework on that house in very strong sandstone, the beach. Just across that hollow I built on dolmitic limestone that was the hardest limestone the blasters had ever drilled. It would be the shallows where the shellfish were. Our engineer looked at the blue, veined, limestone and declared it half an inch from becoming marble.

It's neat looking at what is under our feet 

[pmichelsen]

Wish you were closer to me! I was looking for some to use in my horseshoe pits but the closest granite is a few hundred miles away. We did purchase a large amount years ago when we built our roads and it was a pretty penny.

[KWillets]

You're closer than that:  http://www.tcrcd.net/gvcwshed.htm .  They were giving that stuff away at some point.

Our cabin is along there but, as luck would have it, sits on clay.  One of my projects is to dig out the uphill side of our foundation and put something more worthwhile under there before the skids rot out.  There's currently a big void under part of that because someone decided that cedar rounds would be a good thing to bury as a footing. 

Would this material be good for a foundation or footing?  I can get truckloads for free.  I've been thinking of digging out the rotted wood and the clay layer (maybe another foot) and backfilling it with granite.