Where I'm Finding the Stone

I have a lot of stone on my city lot.  Retaining walls ring the lawn, and at the back of the lot, I have walls terracing up to the abandoned lane way.  I had a fair amount of extra stone piled at the very back.

Back Yard Still Intact

However, once I got started collecting and cleaning the spare stone that I have, I realized that I was going to need something more if I wanted to leave all of the walls and steps that I've built over the years intact.  I live at the base of the Niagara Escarpment, and there is lots of stone laying below, but that is public parkland and off limits as far as I'm concerned.

A little less than 2 km from my home, there was a large dump of fill and in that fill, there is a lot of decent stone.  The problem was that it needed to be collected and cleaned before I could carry it to work and add it to my Carry structure.  Since this project is all about carrying stone, I decided that I'd carry the stones that I collect there home, hose and clean them off and then carry them into work.  I chose an area beside my house as a staging area and piled dirty stone there until I could clean it up and move it to another pile of stone ready to be carried into work.

One in the Hand, Two in the Bag
(and a large one in the backpack)

I used that pile as my source for a while, either walking around to it on my way home from work, or making extra trips to gather stone on the weekends.  A few weeks ago, the pile was bull-dozed flat, so the stone that was sitting on top was now buried or pressed into the muddy surface.  Since then, I've been using a similar smaller pile of fill a little closer to home.