There was a time when I bought my very first excavator. It was a mini excavator and I was doing landscape projects that I dreamed about. Building mountain roads, having big equipment, working on big projects. Now that I'm here with the big equipment and the big projects, working on mountain roads, I wish I would have gotten here a lot sooner. This is probably one of the most fun things that we work on. I absolutely love building roads. There's a lot that goes into it and most of that happens boots on the ground. I've seen a lot of people that will get out a topo map and start drawing roads. But it's not until you get out there, walking through the trees, seeing where the rock outcrops are at, seeing where the big trees are versus where the little trees are, that you really get a feel for the lay of the land and where it makes most sense to put the roads. There's a lot of other things that we look at, like open spots that make sense for home sites, clearing that we can use for piling up slash, where we can burn later without doing a lot of damage to the surrounding trees. Slash is probably one of the biggest things that we have to deal with. As we're clearing roads and pulling stumps, we create a tremendous amount of slash that has to be dealt with. When we start a project, whether it be 20 acres or 40 acres or 80 acres, whatever it might be, this type of work is the very, very first thing that we do is opening up areas where we can put future roads in. By no means is this road building. It's more about road clearing, opening up the area where the road can go in the future. But even before the roads, meaning the gravel, fabric, the road surface, whatever it's going to be, goes in. There's a lot of work that happens between opening it up and clearing things, and putting that gravel and rock down and grating it out, rolling it smooth for carst travel on. There's utilities that need to go in, and there's drainage that needs to be accounted for, and culverts that need to be put in. There's a lot that goes into putting in a road that's going to last. I've seen people that clear the trees, clear the stumps, and then start driving on it, only to be surprised when the road gets dried out and turns to moon dust, or it starts to rain and snow in the fall, and it turns to mud, or it's spring break up and water starts running, and they haven't put in good ditches and culverts to let the water run, and the road washes out. There's a lot to consider, whether you're building roads to serve for five houses, or you're building roads to just serve your own house. Take some time, do some research, and build a road that's going to last a long time. It's better to spend the money up front and have a product that's going to last, than to be a slave to that road, repairing it every single year. Once we have the slash out of the way, and the stumps, and we've moved most of the topsoils stuff, then I like to bring in the road grader. Not that I'm grading a road in the traditional sense of grading a road, but the road grader allows me to clean things up, to sweep the rocks off the road, to move dirt around, to cut the hills out and fill in the low spots. In a lot of these places, we've pulled out a bunch of stumps, we've pulled out a lot of roots, and it's a pretty rough trail at that point. So, in an effort to make things easier for the project, whether it's the dump truck, or the excavator, or skid loader, or just vehicles, people moving around the project, it's always been a good idea to bring in the road grader and just smooth things out so that we can start driving on that road without having to beat ourselves to death. This road is going to continue to change shape and evolve as we move forward with this project, but it seems like with the road grader, if I can get out and run over it a couple of times, and move some dirt around and drive over things, that it starts to get smooth, it starts to get flat, and getting around is a lot easier. I can make faster rounds in the dump truck. It's just easier for everybody as a road starts to take shape. That's something that you need to consider if your building roads on your property, on your driveway, whatever it might be, that if you pull a stump out of the ground, and there's a two or a three-foot hole, and you just throw some softer in that hole, it's going to take some time for that to settle, to compact, and you may end up with a low spot there where that stump came out. I have learned that the hard way a couple of times on some really large stumps that we took out that just I could not seem to get that to compact and to fill, and I continued to have settling and low spots where that big stump was. So take your time, fill it in, compact it, even if it means going and getting some rockier materials, somewhere else as opposed to using the soft material that might be close by. It'll save you a lot of pain and suffering down the road. I think it's been days out here running around on these roads, grading, smoothing over and over and over again, but the reality is, in a week or so there's going to be a rainstorm. The whole place is going to turn into a muddy mess. There's going to be ruts in it, and after the rain when things dry out again, I'll be back out running around trying to smooth things out again. So there's a bit of a fine line between return on investment and overdoing it, just for the sake of burning diesel fuel and making things look pretty. But I have found that cleaning it up makes for a lot smoother road if I can start at the very, very bottom of the road and make it flat and smooth, and then start with fabric on top of that and then gravel on top of that. If I start flat and smooth at the bottom and work my way up, it stays really, really flat, really smooth and we end up with a really nice road when things are all set and done. Thanks for watching.