Hillside lots are common around Rapid City, and a retaining wall is often what makes a sloped yard usable: room for a driveway, a flat patch of lawn, or a cut that won’t slide onto the house. Black River Contracting builds block and boulder retaining walls, and we build them for the part you don’t see.
What we build
- Block walls using segmental retaining wall block, with geogrid on taller walls when the design calls for it.
- Boulder walls that suit Black Hills lots and hold up hillside cuts.
- Replacements for leaning, bulging or collapsed walls.
How a wall goes in
- Dig and base. We dig a trench below the first course and build a compacted gravel base, because a wall is only as straight as what it sits on.
- Drainage. Drain pipe at the bottom behind the wall, outletted so water can get out, with clean rock behind the wall to carry water down to the pipe.
- Build and backfill. We set the wall and backfill it in compacted lifts as it goes up, laying in geogrid where the design calls for it.
- Finish grade. Topsoil and grading on top so surface water runs away from the wall instead of soaking in behind it.
We call in locates through SD811 before we dig. If your wall needs an engineered design, we build to the engineer’s drawings.