Loading…
27
The rain that saved our dig in the Texas hill country
Last spring we were working a 1700s mission site outside San Antonio and the trench walls kept crumbling, every trowel scrape made it worse. Then a three day downpour hit and we thought it was over, but when we came back the water had washed a clean layer of sediment off the foundation line we'd missed for two weeks. Has anyone else had bad weather actually expose something you were about to give up on?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
rowan26221d ago
honestly the same thing happened to me a few years back in New Mexico, we had a wall section that just would not cooperate and kept slumping into ourselves no matter what we did. then a flash flood hit and when we got back out there it had undercut the whole face and left this perfect little hearth feature exposed that we would've troweled right through if we'd kept going. i've learned to stop fighting the weather sometimes, if a section is too dry or too wet i'll just walk away for a day or two and let nature do its thing. it's not always a washout either, sometimes a light drizzle overnight will soften just the top layer and make the stratigraphy pop like a photograph. the trick is checking the site right after the ground drains enough to walk on without making footprints, that's when the details are sharpest. so yeah, bad weather has saved my ass more than once, i'd rather wait out a storm than force a dig knowing the context is getting wrecked.
3