Digging Up the Sandpit

Former Dunedin musterer Ed Mumm moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado and in November 2007 opened the first earthmoving sandpit in the United States, Dig This, where enthusiasts pay top dollar to operate heavy machinery in a 4ha supervised environment. Denver Post reporter Dan Leeth takes a “half-day of recess to sample the big boys’ toys” – Caterpillars which can dig trenches and move boulders. “And it isn’t just the Y-chromosome crowd that takes a shining to digging dirt. As is typical, half of the day’s participants are women,” Leeth writes. Mumm had the big idea sitting in a bulldozer shifting tonnes of dirt and rocks around his Colorado spread. “Putting in this pipeline to a well it occurred to me if I was having this much of a good time, imagine what people who don’t have the opportunity to this kind of thing would think,” Mumm said.