DEEK

About DEEK

Colfax is built into a gulch where the Palouse River cuts straight through downtown, close enough to Main Street that the old buildings back right up against the water, and the hills around town rise so steep that some streets end in stairs rather than intersections. DEEK works those grades in winter, plowing the lots behind the grain elevators down by the tracks and clearing the steep residential streets that climb away from the river toward the county courthouse, where a blade has to fight gravity as much as snow. Wheat stubble covers every hillside outside town, catching wind-driven snow into long drifts that pile against fence posts the way water pools against a dam. The river itself keeps a thin channel of open water even in a hard freeze, steam rising faintly off it on the coldest mornings. Between the water down low and the wheat country up high, Colfax is a town where the plow work runs uphill in both directions from the middle.