South of Bellevue the valley opens out toward Picabo and the Silver Creek country, wide sage flats where the ranches run long private lanes back from the highway to the house, often crossing a cattle guard or two along the way. Joe's Backhoe Service puts its equipment to work down that stretch of valley, clearing the kind of long approach a regular plow truck would take twice as long to finish, pushing snow well back off the lane so it doesn't drift right back across by evening. Cattle still winter out on some of these flats, and the crew clears feed-lot aprons and corral gates alongside the lanes themselves, working around stock that doesn't much care whether the equipment is running or not. Wind off the open sage country down here can scour a lane bare in one stretch and bury the next under a solid drift, so the backhoe often does as much pushing as a plow blade would further up-valley. The ranch lanes south of Bellevue are open clean through to the highway well before the equipment turns back north toward town.