How to get my zero turn up a steep hill?
Maybe this should be posted in an engineering/DIY forum but I thought maybe one of you clever mower enthusiasts may have solved this problem for yourself already and could help me out.
I have a fairly steep hill from my upper yard down to my lower yard. I ride my zero turn backwards up the hill for safety, but it's nearly impossible to get it back up to the top of the hill. I can get it there after many, many tries, but it's always a serious struggle. The hill isn't a uniform gradient. The middle part is slightly steeper than the lower and upper parts, and that's where the wheels start spinning and losing traction, and I have to go down to the bottom and try again and again.
When I first moved into this house the hill was dirt, and it's a crappy mostly-clay dirt that is really slippery. So at first I was laying pine branches on the hill for traction, but that didn't work very well. Then I bought a whole bunch of square exposed aggregate pavers to place on the hill, thinking that the exposed aggregate would give me the traction I needed, and it helped marginally at best.
I spent so much time and money installing the pavers and I have to try like a dozen times to get my mower up the hill, so now I'm asking the collective wisdom of the internet for any ideas before I go spend more time and money on something else that isn't going to work.
The problem is purely traction. I think putting sand or gravel over the pavers is only going to make it worse. Maybe if put some raised 2x4 pressure treated "bumps" between the pavers that are set like an inch above each paver then it might give more traction, but I'm thinking the pavers are big enough where the wheels sit fully on a single paver, so the wheels would probably just spin between the bumps.
The wheels do tend to get muddy when I mow the lower yard, so spraying them off before attempting to climb the hill might help, but it's a pain to get a hose down to the lower yard to do that.
At this point I'm seriously considering installing a winch at the top of the hill to pull the damn thing up, but I feel like there could be a better/easier/cheaper solution that is evading me.