Champing at the bit to chomp up snow

DEADWOOD, S.D. — Got snow? Deadwood has the snow chomper for the job. Chuck Quenzer has worked for the City of Deadwood for over 30 years, and let us join him for today’s cleanup efforts. Here are all of your questions about the contraption, answered.

“It’s called a LeeBoy Snow Loader,” explains Kasey Campbell, Equipment Operator with the City of Deadwood Streets Department.

Actually, no. The original design for the snow loader was related to agriculture- more specifically, picking potatoes. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, I think it is,” says Campbell. “But I’ve been told that that snow loader you’re talking about, the conveyor belt thingy, is originally a potato picker.”

Of course! Moving inches and even feet of snow is a team effort that includes blade operators, a snow loader, front-end loaders, and dump trucks. “We have the blade operators go up and down the streets and make giant wind rows of snow,” Campbell explains. Then, the snow loader takes over with a pair of dump trucks. “There’s some paddles on the front of the snow loader that load it onto a conveyor belt, and the conveyor belt carries it up the conveyor and into the back of a dump truck that is behind the snow loader in reverse, following him along.”

Yes! It takes a day or less for the snow to be cleared out of Deadwood’s downtown method with this system. Then, Campbell says it takes a few more names to get through the rest of the neighborhoods. “We pick days throughout the week where we post the streets for a cleaning, and hopefully everybody in Deadwood gets their cars off the street for us so that we can come and clean their street.”

Deadwood Public Works has a snow blower too, but they choose between the snow loader and snow blower depending on how wet the snow is. “Sometimes if the snow is too sticky, it won’t go through the snow blower very well. So you use the snow loader,” says Campbell. But, he says, the snow loader can work through just about any snow. It’s “pretty much an all-around machine…it can it can usually pick up just about any type of snow.”

Campbell says yes, it is! “It’s nice to see what you’ve done at the end of the day…what it looked like at three in the morning, and what it looks like now that the sun is shining.”