From the grain elevators on the edge of Sidney you can see clear across the tableland to where the storm came from, and by midday after a big one, that's usually where Preferred Roofing and Excavating, LLC has its equipment working—skid steers and a loader clearing the wide lots and access roads that smaller trucks can't touch. The company's excavating side means it already owns the iron for moving real weight, so when a Cheyenne County storm leaves knee-deep drifts across a commercial lot, the same machines that dig foundations in summer push snow into towering piles at the edges instead. Roofs get their turn too, ice worked loose from flat commercial roofs before the weight has a chance to test the trusses. The wind out here doesn't let up just because the snow has stopped falling, so drifts reform in the lee of every building almost as fast as they're cleared. By evening the lots sit open and dark against the white fields beyond, a hard-won clearing in a landscape that doesn't give it up easily.