Buckmier's Excavating

About Buckmier's Excavating

The land around Hettinger rolls into buttes and shortgrass range long before it ever flattens out, ranch country close enough to the South Dakota line that a lot of driveways here are really just gravel section roads leading back to a house nobody else can see from the highway. Buckmier's Excavating already runs the kind of heavy equipment built for moving that ground in summer — leveling pads, cutting drainage, shaping yards — and turns the same machines to winter work when a rancher needs a lane opened before the cattle can be checked. Storms out here don't just drop snow, they load it into the low spots between buttes, drifts that can bury a fence line overnight and leave a lane impassable until someone with the right equipment comes through. That's a different job than clearing a town driveway, closer to reshaping the land than sweeping it off, though it uses the same instincts either season. When the lane opens back up, it's often the only road in or out for a ranch that can't wait on a thaw to do it instead.