We got to work by cleaning the rock inside the gabions built yesterday. Once they had dried a bit, Luke and I brought them inside and tipped them into position along the north wall. The steel was mutilated. The rock that we used (crushed granite) was so heavy that any maneuvering caused the weight to shift and crush the thin steel mesh. They looked pretty good from a distance, but the damage was clear up close. The sight of the gabions (all that work!) being mangled left me feeling pretty distraught the rest of the morning.

Luckily Luke never feels distraught. While Ty and I washed the rest of the rock, he began prepping the east side for a second attempt. We fastened the empty gabions to the furring strips on the wall and tied them together. Then we began adding the rock evenly in all of the gabions simultaneously before stitching the tops. Success! By filling them in place, the steel remained intact and very crisp-looking.

The trade-off, of course, is that the gabions will be immobile and therefore more difficult to disassemble. But based on today’s lesson, it’s clear that we were wrong to ever consider them mobile in the first place. Rock that dense is just too heavy to move around once inside the gabion. Tomorrow we’ll begin work on the gabions for the south side which will be a different size. Hopefully there will be time to perform some repairs on the maimed gabions and refill them using the improved method…