Actually til the REAL pictures make it back to town tomorrow night, here is a sort of explanation. It KINDA goes like this:
The 10 stones were stacked up on two pallets on Chucks Trailer. They were HEAVY. No pics here but Ivan has a BEFORE picture of that. Even 'always positive' Ivan called me at work and told me we needed a Sikorsky Helicoptor to move these.
So we had to get them off the trailer. We used the old Egyptian Slave method... got three short, round logs and got the slabs on them and rolled them off, moving the logs til we got to the end. Then we did a sort of controlled crash to drop the stone not 1.5 feet to the concrete but maybe 8" to a stack of 6x6 cribbing. Then muscled it onto the dolly from there.
We put a rope around the rock and both of us together could pretty much control it going down the driveway. If one of us slipped on the concrete I think it was off the edge.
The two huge slabs we tied a second rope onto it and fished it through the rails on the trailer so I could control and cinch up if needed as Ivan steered and controlled it down the drive.
Once we got it rolled under the deck to the top of the blue lines in the below pic it was a matter of figuring how to get it down the steep slope. We took a couple 2x6s and spaced them 20" apart or so and put 3 cross 2x6s screwed in to keep them parallel. To keep the 'slide' from skittering down the hill we drilled a couple 1/2" holes in the top of each 'leg' and drove a 4' length of 1/2" rebar through it down into the hillside.
There was a foot and a half of space between the concrete and the top of the slide so we put a few 2x6s laying in there. Then we muscled the dolly up and half off the concrete... I took the rope and Ivan gave the rock a push with his legs and feet. Once it started sliding down the hill WAS not stopping or slowing it... it was just using the rope which was flying between my hands (I had on leather gloves) to tighten or loosen my grip as the rock took off like a bat out of hell... to keep it from sliding off the slide. BOOM! Quickly it was to the bottom of the slide and came to an immediate halt at the red X.
Then I tossed the rope down the hill and climbed down the stairs and back up the hill. We both grabbed the rope and dragged the slab the rest of the way down. For the most part it worked fine. the 2 largest slabs would not be dragged.. way too heavy even for two people and even coming down a steep slope... so we had to physically FLIP them... 3 or 4 times to get them to the bottom. Very painful.
We took turns digging massive amounts of dirt from the hillsided and muscled the slabs into place one at a time. You really can't tell til you see the finished pictures but generally they look like this drawings:
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