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Need advice on constructing an arena in N. Carolina

Hello, all. DH and I are building a home near Forest City, N. Carolina. We have red clay as our soil base and need ideas as to what to use and how to layer our riding arena. Any ideas on what to use - sand then gravel? Thank you for any advice you all can give me! (Moving from Michigan so this red clay is interesting!)

The USDF has a nifty booklet called Underfoot which is in the publictions section for about $10. It addresses your arena concerns.

Thank you! I will order this book. It sounds really helpful!

Your results might be different, but near us there weren’t too many riding arena excavators. For the most part we were going to only get a local excavator and it was up to us to direct the construction and specify the base and riding material, depths and configuration. Telling a Cat 235 operator to dig enough for a 20 meter circle might not fly!. Also bear in mind that a standard riding arena 80x200 feet will require three 14 yard truckloads to add one inch over the entire arena. we thought we were looking at a nice flat area to build our arena: it took over 100 loads to make it flat.