Why terrace a slope at all?
Think about water filling a container. It finds the level. People are the same way in a yard, we want flat ground to stand on, to put a table on, to let kids run on. A slope gives you none of that. It's pretty to look at and useless to use.
Terracing fixes that by cutting the slope into a stack of flat steps, each held in place by a retaining wall. Suddenly you don't have a hillside, you have outdoor rooms: a patio here, a lawn panel there, a fire-pit terrace below. That's the real product of terraced grading. Not walls for their own sake, but flat, usable space where there wasn't any.
Why do two short walls beat one tall one?
This is the single most useful thing to understand about hillside grading, so let me walk through it. The pressure pushing on a retaining wall grows with height, fast. A ten-foot wall is carrying enormous load at its base. Split that same drop into two five-foot walls with a few feet of flat ground between them, and each wall is only holding back half the height. The load on each one drops dramatically.
That gives you four wins at once. The walls engineer more simply and cheaply because each carries less. They drain better, because each gets its own drainage line. They hold up better in an earthquake, which matters on the Wasatch Fault, because no single wall is overloaded. And the flat step between them becomes usable, a planting bed, a path, a seating ledge. Mapleton's code actually requires terracing above ten feet, but you can see why good designers don't wait for the rule. They terrace at four to six feet because it's simply the better wall system.
What do terraced layouts look like on a bench lot?
A few patterns repeat across Maple Mountain bench builds, because they map cleanly onto how much fall a yard has.
Two-tier rear yard
Walkout to an upper terrace (patio, outdoor kitchen, fire pit), a four-foot offset wall, then a lower terrace at pool-deck level. Typical for 10 to 15 percent slopes with 8 to 12 feet of fall.
Three-tier rear yard
Adds a middle terrace for a lawn panel or planting beds. Common on 15 to 22 percent slopes where there's more drop to absorb.
Cascading entry sequence
Front-yard terraces with structural steps from the street up to the entry. Shows up on the steeper Maple Leaf Cove and Hidden Hollow Cove lots.
Pool-deck-as-terrace
The pool deck is itself a full terrace, with a wall on the uphill side holding back the upper yard and the pool stepping down to a lower level.
Curious how many terraces your yard needs?
It comes down to how much fall you have across the yard. A quick conversation can tell you whether you're looking at two tiers or three, and roughly what that means for the budget.
Talk through your terracing(XXX) XXX-XXXX· Mon–Sat, 8am–7pm
Why is drainage between terraces so critical?
Here's a failure mode that's easy to picture. Water pools on your upper terrace. It soaks down into the soil behind the wall below. Now that lower wall is holding back not just earth but saturated, heavier earth pushing harder. Do that season after season in the bench's expansive clay, which swells when wet, and the lower wall starts to lose.
So every terrace needs its own drainage: a perforated pipe behind each wall, routed to daylight or a storm drain, and grading on each step that moves water off it rather than letting it sit. A terraced system with drainage at every level is far more reliable in this soil than one tall wall ever could be, which is one more reason terracing is the right call here.
What does Mapleton require for grading?
A few things to know before equipment shows up:
- The 10-foot rule: walls higher than ten feet must be terraced, not built continuous.
- Engineered grading plans: cut or fill above the city's threshold needs stamped grading plans through Mapleton Community Development.
- CE-1 zone: any disturbance of slopes 30 percent or greater requires approval first. Doing it without a permit is a class B misdemeanor.
- Compaction: Mapleton expects roughly 90 percent compaction under concrete improvements, which covers wall footings, terrace pads, and pool decks.
- Planting: the city's landscape rules generally limit sod to slopes under 10 percent and encourage drought-tolerant plants on hillsides, which shapes how the upper terraces get planted.
The full code and permit picture is on the permits page. See permits, codes & engineering →
Common questions about terracing
How much usable yard does terracing actually add?
A lot, because it converts slope you couldn't stand on into flat space you can use. Instead of a hillside, you get defined rooms: patio, lawn, dining, fire pit. The exact gain depends on your fall and lot width, but the point of terracing is precisely to manufacture usable flat area where there was none.
Should I terrace the front yard, the back, or both?
Depends on where your slope and your living happen. Most bench builds terrace the rear yard because that's the outdoor-living side. Steeper lots often need front-yard terracing too, just to get a comfortable entry sequence from the street up to the door. Many lots end up doing both.
My terraces are settling. What went wrong?
Usually it's compaction or drainage. If the fill under a terrace pad wasn't compacted to spec, it keeps consolidating and the pad drops. If water is getting behind the walls, it's washing out fines and softening the base. Either way it's worth getting assessed before it pulls the hardscape apart.
Is terracing cheaper than one big wall?
Often, yes, once you account for everything. A single tall wall needs heavier engineering, a bigger footing, and more reinforcement to handle the load. Splitting it into stepped walls spreads the load and usually simplifies the structure enough to come out even or ahead, and you get usable terraces in the bargain.