Stripping strategies

I am looking at a job next weekend for a friend. He just bought a 40 in northeastern Washington, and we'll be looking at road in, and clearing for buildings. The vast majority will be left natural. From the pictures it looks like a bunch of it is in pasture and then there's some brush and trees.
I think the goal is going to be avoid all the trees we can. So what is your strategy with sod-like pasture strippings?
We won't have a truck, so I won't be able to haul them to some low spot. I could cut a ditch at the far edge of the road clearing and lay them in there on the downhill side to rot.
That seems to be the logical thing to me, to over strip a little bit and allow for ditches on each side of the road plus this extra ditch for the strippings. Any other bright ideas?

If it is good topsoil I would pile it up in a corner out of the way and after he gets buildings and such built then spread a thin layer of that over any of the future excavations.

Not familiar with the term "a forty" does that mean 40 acres?

How long a driveway and how big are the proposed buildings? I'm with 466 if it's good topsoil I would stockpile along the way for re-spread after construction.

What type of equipment do you have at your disposal?

"How long a driveway and how big are the proposed buildings? "
I think the main drive won't be more than 500', as there is an access road and power at the top edge of the property where that view is. The house probably 2000 sq. ft or so, and at least a 40x60 shop.

Yes it's a 40 acre plot, and one of the service roads to the well house may be ~2000' or so long. Piling it in a corner is not a thing with that long a road. I could make smaller piles along the way.
There are a couple of ways to go. We may rent a 160 excavator and get the well trench and utilities trenches dug, then call that off and call in a Case 850 dozer.
Alternatively, I may get the dozer first and do all the grading and road work first. I may be forced to do that because the trench locations might not be known. Ideally it would be trench first and make it all nice with the dozer after.
Those are the local rental pieces available. I could go smaller on the excavator but with 2000'~3000' of trench possibly with some rocks I always go as big as I can. I can backfill the trenches and cut ditch and build road grades with the dozer. He has a little kubota that is not going to move any volumes on the scale of things. It might serve to pack some sand bedding for sparky.
Once again, a smaller dozer is just painful to think about.
Most of it will be left natural, but I can imagine a 200' square which is an acre, cleared and stripped and leveled for the main yard. he will build a shop and house near each other but position the shop to not harm the view.

Hopefully I can get some of these locations nailed down. Leveled is a bad term, they get some snow there and truly flat would be miserable in the springtime melt. I'd rather make small flat spots and slope away from them and swale and control the runoffs.

Damn..what a view. Makes me want to touch myself where I shouldn't.

Ed

I hate the idea of even cutting the well ditch and access to the lower end, but it has to be done. The water is down that way, and the view is really the top of the ridge so a well would be beaucoups spendy by the house. Of course, 2000' of wire and pipe is not cheap either!!

I'm on site now. Looks like maybe 300 ft of road and he does have a little Kubota so I think I will make some small piles for him to pick up later. It's going to be a very minimal impact if at all possible. I'm just going to flatten the pad for a 40x80 shop and make access to the end of it, not the side of it. It's on the side hill so I will cut a flat spot and take those spoils to make the wide area out in front of it for the turnaround. It's really the only way to deal with the spoils in a fill that won't have the building on it.
The house cut will come later when he figures out exactly what he's doing there.

I brought post hole diggers and the digging bar so I could do a soil survey. The one hole I dug over by the house area shop area I went down over two feet of good stuff just a few small rocks. There are quite a few surface rocks in areas but I think there's soil everywhere no sign of bedrock.
He brought his pickup camper and we are on one corner of the property.

I was there for only 20 hours or so, and we saw 20 deer on or around his 40 acres. There were a few of those meat eater wasps but we had no issues sharing some steak scraps with them. No biting flies and too much breeze for mosquitoes. I did find one tick but we had busted the brush over his 40 every which way.
There was fresh elk, bear, coyote scat.
The only other bug was a lone beetle behind the tall grass.


The grass around his truck was too tall to risk bringing my cat converter through. There was a big fire 10 miles north of us and the danger is very high.

We plotted a road plan into the spot with the *BEST* view, but, it was some serious sidehill at that area. His house plan would involve a crane and a daylight basement if he went modular, which is very likely. That road was ~550' long with a couple of culverts and a whole lot of fill to dispose of.
He wants to have nearly no impact and I am aware of how much fill comes out of a cut, etc.
Later on I walked to another spot only 250' from that first one, and the view was nearly as good. The only big difference was you could see a neighbor's house 300 yards away. That was no big deal to him, and that site was a whole lot less trouble. I think the road to the shop is now in the 300' or less range. One culvert across a low area and burn some fill into the road and track it in as best I can. I have no issue with the road on fill as long as he knows the top will need some dressing and extra rock as it settles in.
The new view to the southwest:


He also has that similar view to the northwest to the lake from there too, but I did not take a picture of it. It is like this.

My 2 cents worth. Using an excavator strip all the soil from top of batter on the uphill side to toe of batter on the downhill side. After completing the earthworks spread the soil over the batters. On the uphill side make a bund with some of the soil so runoff water doesn't run down the batter. This way it won't take long for the vegetation to grow back. If you have a rotatary laser a 1% cross fall on the house pad should be sufficient.
If it wasn't for this bloody virus and distance I'd volunteer to help.

I'll be using a dozer only, I'd pick a roller as my second piece if I had the option for this first phase. Now the scope of operations are:
1) strip the road and shop site only, plus a turn in front of shop.
2) put in a culvert if needed on the road, and fill over the culvert with the cut from the shop pad area. Track it in.
3) use the cut material to also build the turn area in front of the shop.
4) place 2" minus rock over the road and the turn in front of the shop. I am guesstimating 5 solo loads maximum.
5) maybe just maybe cut some perk holes with the dozer. It is not ideal but all I need to do is give the designing engineer a clean soil profile to 3' or so. I can work a 6 way blade and do that. Piece of Cake as they say

The house site will wait for the building permits. It is going to be a tight excavation, only what is needed and there is no plan yet.
I will probably come back and get a mini onsite to trench power in and trench to the well head, but that is a few months out as the driller is booked.
He is not going to have a road up to the house,except for the construction purposes. Vehicles will stop at the shop and the most we will make when the construction dust settles is a narrow path from shop to house, suitable for backing a pickup to it for a delivery and for a side by side or golf cart.
He is thinking about a log home kit, and I told him we could get a cheap neck bender and set the logs ourselves.

there was a ton of organics across the bottom part! I ended up with some big berms that I just stomped on with the dozer for a while. and another area I filled a ravine with it and cut off a knob that had quite a bit of rock in it so that boned up the strippings good enough that he can drive on it later. The house and shop plans are still really up in the air so I can't cut the pads. I did doze in a road for the well site which is up on the hill thankfully now and not far from the house.
I was able to get seven loads of rock today I could have used 10 or 11. The driver is going to tailgate two more out for him on Monday.

Looking out to where we started on the neighbor's property. The dozer was parked with 6 hours on it. I am hoping they give him the weekend special of 1.5 days if we kept it under 12.
I still had to road it about a mile down to where they could pick it up. The lowboy driver barely got it up to us, but he said empty truck that would not happen.