On November 17, 2015, the finishing touches were put on the replacement retaining wall. This included moving earth to the top of the wall to level it with the area up there, and concrete was poured at the corners to connect the sections together (pic 1 below). Pics 2 and 3 are before and after images that show the grand scope of work.
In the end, we built what we intended to: a durable replacement wall that will last through just about anything short of a catastrophic earthquake, and then it would probably be just fine…but who knows?
And we finished just in the nick of time–three days after the last of the concrete work, this is what it looked like up here as the winter rains arrived in force (last pic).