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GREENSBORO - They're the doctors of dirt.

Every year, they come into the biggest arena in central North Carolina and create a mud-packed playground for behemoth machines with wheels as big as any boulder at the N.C. Zoo.

They speak in sign language only they know and work nearly around the clock as they tamp down hills of dirt into a burnt-orange carpet, 6 inches deep, full of humps, jumps and wrecked cars spray-painted Popsicle blue.

It's taken them nearly a day. But they're done, and their handiwork will help attract a crowd of 30,000 fans this weekend to the Greensboro Coliseum to see machines named Grave Digger and Monster Mutt hurdle cars and roar.

It's a moneymaker. And it's one of the coliseum's most anticipated shows every year. But it's the dirt that makes it work.

It comes from a vacant lot across from the arena. Look behind a cluster of billboards off Coliseum Boulevard - and you have to look hard - and you'll see it: a mountain of dirt, sculpted by bulldozers into a big rectangle.

A small crew from Yates Construction in Stokesdale molded that mountain. They usually grade roads or build houses. But this week, they'll take truckloads of dirt to - and from - the arena for the Monster Jam.

They've been doing it for years.

"You see all that dirt out there?" Leo Willard, one of Yates' dump-truck drivers, has told his 12-year-old grandson, Tyler. "We put it out there."

"You did, Bepa?" Tyler responded.

They're grown men with big toys, and they get to play with tons of dirt, dump it onto an arena floor and spend hours sculpting, pushing, pulling and shaving.

This marquee spot for hoops and hip-hop is their big sandbox.

Joe Boyer wears his hunter's camouflage outfit and zigzags across the dirt, with a rod in his hand. He's poking the dirt every few feet to make sure it's six inches deep.

He also eyes every patch he sees, even dropping to his knees. He's looking for trash. He hunts deer and turkey in Mayodan, and he uses those same skills to find rocks, plastic car pieces and strands of wire as long as a garter snake.

By the time he's done, he'll fill three 30-gallon trash barrels.

John Thompson drives the bulldozer. He plows up - and down - small mounds of dirt and levels out all he sees. His head bounces back and forth, looking at either end of his blade to get the dirt the right height.

After 35 years behind a bulldozer, he almost always gets it right.

Off to the side is Don Beal in his caution-orange jacket with "The Dirt Guys" across the back. He's chewing tobacco, carrying a can of orange spray paint.

And he's looking up. Straight up.

Beal can eyeball any arena's ceiling, look around him and pick the track's exact center without pulling out a measuring tape. And nearly every time, he's within an inch - or two.

Several months out of the year, he lays out monster-truck tracks nationwide. From Greensboro to Detroit, Chicago to Providence, R.I., he'll suck down coffee and work until it's done.

He's Dozer Don to some because he runs his own heavy equipment company back in Ohio. But to the jeans-and-boots community surrounding Monster Jam, he's known by another nickname: The Dirt Guy.

And no wonder. He's been designing monster-truck tracks for nearly a quarter-century.

He's brought in his two sons. And he's brought in nearly all the other monster-truck track designers working nationwide. That's a team of 30. And that includes an old racer from Beal's days of running a Motocross track.

Back then, Shawn Arcaro was 15. Today, he's 37, a father of two, a man who hears his 12-year-old son, Brandon, tell his friends, "My daddy knows the owner of Grave Digger."

This weekend, Arcaro is working beside Beal, his old Motocross track owner, The Dirt Guy.

The real Doctor of Dirt.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com