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A big thanks to Tony and Skip for working today. Tony has done an incredible amount of work for us with his excavator. Today he started by grading off three areas of slumping along the trail.
Before: (click images to enlarge)

Slumping adjacent to trail

Grading to remove slump

In addition to simply pushing the rock and soil away from the trail we also improve the grade to run water away from the trail and fill-in section that are below trail level. This improves trail safety and eliminates the boggy sections that were accumulating water.

Grading adjacent to trail.

Tony deepened the trench on the east side of the tunnel. We started at the entrance and set a laser bubble level on a sawhorse to help maintain the depth.

Laser at tunnel entrance

We used a yardstick to check the depth of the trench; note the laser “dot” in the photo.

Checking the trench depth

Skip and I were tired after all the grading, trench work and clean-up, but we both wanted to see how the wet vac would work on slurping the mud from the tunnel floor. So, we unloaded the generator and hooked up the wet vac. We collected some of the mud/water into an existing pool with squeegees and started to slurp up the mess. It worked great. I shot a photo showing how good it worked on a section of floor that had been squeegeed.

Wet vac results

We managed to work our way over to the large batch of mud that Tiffany and I had accumulated last week, between lights 3&4. Skip pushed some water from adjacent sections over with the squeegee and we managed to capture nearly all the mud, before cracking the vac nozzle on the concrete. Since we couldn’t vacuum the flat surfaces we started cleaning out drains. It’ll be interesting to see if the drains work better with the extra sludge removed by the vac.