How Boulderscape turned two structural retaining walls into East Tennessee bedrock — 22,364 square feet of structural and architectural shotcrete, hand-carved and stained to vanish into the hillside along Highway 33.
Along Highway 33 in Maynardville, Tennessee, TDOT's CNW068 project called for two new retaining walls to hold back the folded shale hillsides of Union County. The engineering bar was high — but so was the aesthetic one. In this stretch of East Tennessee rock country, a plain gray wall would read as an intrusion; the walls had to perform structurally and look like they'd always been part of the landscape.
Boulderscape answered with a dual-layer shotcrete system: an 8-inch structural shotcrete section to carry the load, topped by a 1-to-3-inch architectural shotcrete face our artisans hand-carved into the region's signature geology. Structural performance and sculpted stone, placed as one continuous system — no cladding, no veneer, no separate finish trade.
From on-site mock-ups through final placement, every square foot was sculpted by hand into Boulderscape's Weathered Shale finish, then custom-stained on site to match the natural color and character of the surrounding East Tennessee rock. The result is a wall that fractures, folds, and weathers like the bedrock beside it.
Two retaining walls that read as native rock formation — long-term slope support that belongs to its setting. At Boulderscape, shotcrete isn't just how we build; it's how we make infrastructure belong. Retaining nature. Sustaining beauty. Since 1984.
