The whole upper garden is flowing downhill, carrying with it a huge boulder that Tim is standing on. As I mentioned before, anything built on a hill will eventually wind up at the bottom of that hill. Black topsoil has also flowed down and was leaning against the stair stringers and landing. The tons of weight had already pushed the steps out of alignment, but worse, the soil (and insect life) was beginning to rot away the substructure. Click pic to enlarge.
You can see where the stringers were submerged in earth.The remedy is to roll the boulder back uphill and dig all the soil away to allow the timbers to dry out and to keep the worms and insects in the soil from eating the wood. We've learned around here to take any soil we dig out back to the top of the hill to ensure the cycle continues.
Looking good now. If the rain holds off, we'll work tomorrow to get some gravel and stone in an effort to keep the soil away from the wood. Then we can add more rocks to try and shore everything up and slow down the relentless effect of gravity on our hillside project.
The process of earth sliding down the hill is called mass wasting. It occurs when rock, soil, mud, ice, trees, vegetation, roads, houses, or anything else, moves downhill. As a result, these processes occur over a range of speeds, from fast to slow. We usually think of those processes that occur fast, since these are the most well known. For instance, the terrible slide this week where all four members of a family were killed in the wreckage of a house swallowed in a landslide northeast of Montreal. Yet mass wasting does occur in processes with very slow and imperceptible speeds, (as in our case here) called creep and land subsidence.
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