Dirt Works Wyoming

About Dirt Works Wyoming

Dirt Works spends its summers moving earth for the ditches and levees that keep the Bighorn Basin's irrigated fields green against a landscape that is otherwise badlands and sage, and its winters clearing the farm lanes that run along those same canals. On a gray midwinter afternoon, the crew works its way down the section-line roads outside Worland, pushing snow off the approaches to grain bins and equipment yards before the light fades. The basin's flood-irrigated fields lie flat and white under a low ceiling of cloud most of the winter, cut through by the dark lines of plowed farm roads. Levee roads along the Bighorn River get cleared too, since they carry as much farm traffic in January as the highway does. It is the same ground Dirt Works has moved dirt on all year, just frozen instead of turned.