Clearing the Way services

About Clearing the Way services

Willow is a scatter of homes among spruce and birch rather than a town in any dense sense, and most winters it's best known as the place where the Iditarod's trucks and dog trailers gather for the restart each March. Long before the race, though, the snow has already been falling on Willow Creek and the gravel spurs branching off the Parks Highway, and somebody has to keep those long driveways open through a season that runs long and still. Clearing the Way works those spurs one at a time, plowing back through the trees to homes that might sit a quarter-mile off the highway with no neighbor in sight. The bend of the highway shows the mountains in glimpses through the spruce on a clear day, gone again the next under a low sky. When the restart trucks finally roll in and the crowds show up for a single loud morning, the roads that get them there have already been cleared quietly, all winter long.