For those who attentively follow the events and changes at Sadhana Forest, especially those who enjoy the Friday evening tour through the forest, here is some exciting news! No longer will clean footwear be tarnished by the monsoon mud, for a crew of trail-builders has been hard at work building a turnpike.
What is a turnpike?
To put it simply, a turnpike is a trail structure commonly used to drain away excess water from a particular section of a path or trail, in this case, the muddy areas that have been hampering the movement of people while on the Forest walk.
Not so simply put, what the trail crew did was sink three parallel holes about 1.4 meters long by half a meter wide, each hole being approximately 2 meters apart. Once done, a base layer of large rocks were placed in each hole, followed by a middle layer of fist sized rocks, capped with small stones. If you now have a picture in your mind’s eye of the three rectangles of rock evenly spaced out in a line in the mud, you’ve got the idea.
Before completely filling the holes though, four pillars of granite weighing at around 300 kilos each, were hauled in from the entrance to Children’s Land half a kilometers distance by the intrepid crew of six and placed in the ground at the work site. Phew!
Placing two rows of granite running perpendicular to the rectangles of rocks in the ground, we now have the space in which to walk. The pillars were chalked with stones to keep them stable, and the area between the two lines of granite were filled in with yet more stone.
You might be thinking, wouldn’t it be more uncomfortable to walk over jagged rocks than mud? Most people would reply yes, which is why a thin layer of earth was firmly packed onto the stones in the middle, topped with smooth pebbles.
Why all the rock though? Well, the idea behind the stone-laden holes beneath it all is that during the monsoon season, excess water will invariably slip off the sides or be deflected by the pebbles on the top, but the moisture that usually got trapped in the clay below will now find it easier to percolate into the soil because of that strata of rock. The pillars making up the sides of the structure are there to keep the top layer of rock in place and secure, so that again when the rains come all that fun in the sun won’t all be for nought!
So that, friends and family, is what went on in the woods last week at Sadhana; hope you enjoy your next visit to the Forest, sans mud!
By Ian Barbosa