Stonedust outdoor ring

[mg]

I am in my last year of college and will be moving back home once I graduate in the spring. Once I move back, I will be keeping my pony at my grandmother's private farm. While the barn is very pretty, not much care was taken when planning it and the barn and arena were built without any consideration beyond appearance. Alas, I'm not one to complain when I have a facility to use that wasn't built on my dollar, but I need some advice about what to do with the ring.

The ring is a gigantic (I'm going to say about 60m x 200m) outdoor built at the bottom of a slope, without drainage, and an awful stonedust top layer which will have had almost 2 years to harden without any dragging by the time I get back. For the two summers I spent there between college years, I had to drag the ring multiple times a week so it would not get like concrete (and it takes a LONG TIME to drag a ring that big!). Also, because of the poor drainage, many "valleys" formed in the ring and it is incredibly uneven, particularly on one long-side.

I don't know a lot about ring construction, so I'm wondering what would be the best route to take with this. Should I add stonedust to fill in the uneven areas, compact it, and then add a top-layer of a different material to it? Or would it really just be cheaper in the long run to rebuild the ring properly with drainage and the like?

If it makes any difference, the barn is in Maine, so the ring does experience lots of snow and ice in the winter. Will this tamper with ring construction at all?

[Hilary]

I would re-level the arena - fill in the low spots with more stone dust, recompact, then add some kind of footing on top that alleviates the need to drag. Sand is the cheapest.

Riding on plain stone dust is way too hard, especially if you fall off on it!

[Trevelyan96]

Agree with Hillary. Level it with the stone dust and compact, then put a layer of masonry sand on top, which is the large grit type sand. Not sure what prices are in ME, but in MD it goes for about a little over $500 for a dump truck load, which is 22 ton. That covered a roughly 50 x 70' area about almost 2" deep for me.

If your budget it limited, start with the outside track for a 60 x 100' area and work it from the outside to the inside. That should give you a good track for flatwork plus the quarter line, and maybe a thin layer through the middle?

Then, as finances allow, you can continue adding sand.