Rocking and rolling

nto the road near Carlile last week – a casualty, it seems, of the sudden influx of moisture caused by the snowstorm the day before.

Reports of the rock's infiltration came in just after 8 p.m. on Thursday, October 14.

"The day after the storm, when everything was starting to melt," says Brad Marchant, WYDOT Area Maintenance Supervisor.

The fall was not entirely unexpected, he explains, as, "It's a natural trouble spot. We've had a lot of rocks come down there over the years."

"It's the kind of slope that's about one to one and the rock is up high and below is just soils," he says.

WYDOT has had the slope scaled, he said, but every so often an excess of moisture causes a fall.

"I'm sure it's so dry this year that the soil just soaked up all that moisture and just let the rocks come," Marchant says.

Because the rock came down into the middle of one lane of the highway, a quick response was needed. Moorcroft Volunteer Fire headed out to the site first to provide traffic control with the assistance of Wyoming Highway Patrol, with WYDOT following shortly after to retrieve the errant boulder.

Fortunately, though the rock was pretty sizeable, it wasn't too big to be moved.

"They were able to push it out of the road. It wasn't like the one we had ten or 12 years ago that really was big," Marchant says.

"That one, I think we pulled five or six truckloads of rock out of there after we broke it up."

The plan, he says, is to remove the rock from the ditch once things dry out and the ditch itself is less soft.