The newer subdivisions climbing the benches west of Driggs, up toward the timber at the foot of the Big Hole Mountains, sit on driveways that were often cut straight into a hillside not that many years back, and those grades hold snow and ice differently than anything down on the flat valley floor. Mountain Mulching & Excavation clears those cut-in driveways with the same read on a slope that goes into laying one out in the first place — where the grade steepens, where water runs off and refreezes overnight, where a plow blade needs to lift rather than push straight through. A driveway on a bench like that can ice over in a shaded curve while the sunny stretch twenty feet away is bare, so the crew works each one in sections rather than one straight pass. Down on the valley floor the cold settles heavy enough on its own, but up on these benches the added elevation stacks another layer of freeze onto a driveway, one that holds past when the flats have already gone soft. Getting a resident down off the bench safely on the first icy morning of the season is what this route exists for.