Zion Excavation

About Zion Excavation

Ephrata sits down in the channeled scablands of the Columbia Basin, where black basalt coulee walls rise up on either side of town and the irrigation canals that turn this desert into farmland run empty and frozen through the winter months. Zion Excavation works that same basin ground, plowing the long farm roads and canal-side lanes that connect fields and outbuildings to the highway, using equipment built for moving earth the rest of the year and turned to moving snow when a basin storm comes through. Winter out here is dry and clear more often than not, with hard frost silvering the sagebrush at first light and a sky big enough to hold the whole Frenchman Hills at once, but when snow does fall it tends to blow flat across the open basin floor and pile against the first thing in its path. The crew reads those drift lines the way they'd read a grading job, moving snow off the road and clear of the canal berms rather than just pushing it to the shoulder. Out here, where the land was shaped by ancient floodwaters and now by irrigation ditches, a plowed road through the basin is its own small feat of moving earth.