drivewayice
I looked at a house today and one of its drawbacks was that it had a very long, steep driveway. In New England we get thick snow, sleet and ice and with a steep driveway I am concerned the car might have trouble getting up it, or might slide off it going down.
The driveway drops 50 feet over 300 feet which is a grade of over 9 degrees in some places.
Is there any way to make such a steep driveway safer?
You could, but it strikes me as a bad idea for a few reasons. First, you'll have to replace it every year (or at least every 2-3 years). Second, you'll get much better traction on gravel, especially when wet or snowy. Finally, mulch is much more likely to wash out in the rain, especially if it's only a shallow layer.
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Best Answer
Having lived a good portion of my life in an area where heavy snowfall is common I can say that the best way to deal with snow in any driveway is to keep it shoveled out down to the underlying surface. You should at all possibilities try to keep it shoveled, plowed or blown before any attempt to drive on it. In many cases driving on it compacts the snow down and begins to cause a build up of compacted snow ice that will tend to want to stay there for the rest of the winter. These comments can apply to any driveway but especially to one like you describe which is a serious grade.
In my last years of living in snow country I had a medium steep driveway that rose about 6 feet over a run of about 45 feet. I was working long days at my job and there were multiple drivers in the family that used the driveway multiple times before I could get it cleaned out each time it snowed. I can say that it was a mess of slippery iciness that was hard to drive in. Some years the icy build up was as much as 8 inches thick. The work around solution that I used was to spread liberal amounts of course sand over it to provide traction till the next snow.