I'm in South Florida. We have no hills. The land is flat for as far as the eye can see.One recommendation I would make is to get a demo of the machine on your property if possible. Not all HST's are equal, I tried the HST NH and found it struggled going up hills without any load. I went with the EHSS because it had no trouble pulling on hills. I was always leery of HST on CUT's. Surprisingly my M59 seems to have more grunt for loader work than my EHSS ever did.