The objective of this study is to investigate the soil surface crusting; its characteristics, how surface crusting develops, and how crusting affects soil erosion. Field experiments were conducted to measure the total soil loss by storm. Orthophotos that covered the entire runoff plots were taken and images were post processed to quantify the progress of crust development. The results were then used to find the correlation between slope lengths, and a treatise of crust development was obtained. The field observations as well as the images registered in series of orthophotos indicate that terrace-like structures were formed when surface crusts were damaged by erosion mechanism. The distance to the downstream boundary and the extent of the development of the terrace-like structures were affected by the slope length. The numbers of terraces and the step sizes were founded to be related to the runoff routes. Terraces located at the confluence of runoff routes appeared to possess greater step as well as order jumps, of which, a terrace can skip the sequential order and leaps from low-order terrace to higher order. Total soil loss obtained from field measurement also indicated that rainfall intensity has greater impact on the erosion of the crusts.