Traveling the Old Red Trail

OBSTACLES FOR EARLY ROAD BUILDERS
These early roads were made on the dirt surface and badgers and groundhogs dug holes in the road. Also each spring thaw, rocks were thrust to the surface. These situations made travel on the roads very bumpy. The worst problem with dirt roads was rain. Vehicles traveling on a wet road left deep ruts. If the road was to be made level again, men with scrapers would need to need to go and smooth out the ruts, dig out the rocks and fill in the holes.

Building and maintaining roads on a relatively flat surface was a challenge for workers. But a much greater challenge existed if the road site consisted of steep hills, large sloughs, gullies, or rivers. A slough is a depression in the land that is filled with water during much of the year. Very often, it was easier to build a road around these water bodies, however, this added to the cost of road construction. Gullies are channels of water that are created after a heavy rainstorm. If a road is built where gullies exist, the road will be washed out after a heavy downpour. Culverts, large drain structures, needed to be installed under the roads.

If road workers encountered rivers, bridges needed to be constructed. Bridge construction was very expensive. Where bridges could not be built, the driver and automobile went across the river on a ferry. A ferry was a small flat boat that took passengers and vehicles from one side of the river to the other side.

The eastern half of the state is relatively flat with a large number of sloughs and some rivers and the western half of North Dakota has many hills and gullies. The cost for building roads through these obstacles was much greater and, in these environments, roads were few and far between. All of these obstacles were encountered when building what became known as the Red Line Trail