Slippery Rock Gazette

The Rocky Road to Lyons Sandstone

Lyons Sandstone is celebrating 20 years in the quarry business, headed by co-owners Bernard and Brenda Buster.

Peter J. Marcucci

Photos Courtesy Lyons Sandstone

Originally used as a livestock pasture in the 1800s, the Lyons Sandstone quarry, located in Lyons, Colorado, found its true merit as a supplier to a growing west and mid-west America in the 1800s and 1900s. From The Califoarnia Gold Rush, to Chicago’s dominance as a mid-western meat packing and manufacturing hub, immigrants from all parts of the world came in droves to these areas to begin their American dream; and as the railroads tied the cities together, more and more building materials were needed. Wood was being supplied by vast numbers of logging operations throughout Oregon, Washington, Colorado and northern California, while quarries, both local and distant, supplied the stone to build the homes, the skyscrapers and the factories.

The Early Years

If you ask Lyons Sandstone co-owners Bernard and Brenda Buster about the history of their quarry, they’ll tell you it’s been a rocky road with lots the ups and downs and bumps in-between, recalled Bernard Buster. “The property that we are quarrying on was actually a cattle ranch that my dad, Louden Buster, bought in 1958 to continue using as a cattle ranch. The quarries that were on the property since the 1800s had been operated pretty much by contractors coming and going, over the years. Fortunately, we did collect some modest royalty checks over the decades. As for the cattle ranching, there were just too many years of drought, and the property was too small to support the size of heard that was needed to make a living at it. Dad did try quarrying for one year in 1969. He had a flatbed farm truck, and a friend also had a flatbed truck with a boom that would load pallets onto dad’s truck. That was the sole amount of motorized equipment they had. Everything else was done with bars, wedges and sledge hammers.”

In the old days, according to Bernard, the quarried blocks were carved and used primarily for architecture, both locally as well as nationally. Fortunately, the sandstone formations were and still are very close to the surface; with most being hog backs (hilly ridges) that allowed the overburden (surface material) to get pushed over the edge.

Stone has been quarried on the Lyons Sandstone acreage since the 1800s. Average yearly production is 17,000 tons, with some 13,000 tons in dimensional stone, and 4,000 in landscaping stone and rip rap.

Their Komatsu excavator and two loaders help move stone and dig through the light overburden.

Build It and They Will Come

Lyons Sandstone uses four Cee-Jay slpitters to produce their natural-cleft finished Red Lyons sandstone products. Other stone products range from thin-venner cladding to full-size sidewalk flagstones.

“We had wanted to move back to Colorado for the 22 years that Brenda and I had been married, and thought that 1998 was a reasonable time to do it,” continued Bernard. “You could also say it was a mid- life crisis when switching from one profession to another. So, our first year running the quarry was 1999, and we’ve been in business for twenty years now.”

Brenda Buster: “About 15 years ago, we began drilling holes, and we would crack the rock as a back seam to break the chunks lose and distribute them among the workers that would then split them and put them on pallets. As the years went by, the amount of product that we’ve found markets for has changed dramatically. A lot of the overburden and blocky pieces that we hadn’t developed a market for really got started after the flood here in 2013, because so many river banks were rebuilt and stabilized using local chunks and pieces. During this recovery process, we shipped thousands of tons of rubble to rebuild roads so people could get to and from their homes.

“As for our cut pieces and blocks, we rarely sort for color. Occasionally, we will do an up-charge and cull out the real outliers. However, our Lyons Red is not like the Arizona quarries, where they have their peach, their rose, and their cream. There is hardly any color variation.

“Our quarries are really just big holes in the ground, and the formations are sedimentary stone,” continued Bernard. “Most people think of sedimentary stone as water-born, but this stone is actually from the sand dunes along the shores of the Great Inland Seas dating back to 270 million years ago.

“So instead of laying in flat layers that would be characteristic of water-born sediments, the stone lays in a jumble, partly because of when the Rocky Mountains pushed up through those sand dunes, they scrambled things. Then, of course, as the wind would blow, it would blow from different directions, so you never see absolutely level sand dunes. You see hills and valleys, and our stone follows all of those lines and is kind of unpredictable.”

In 2008, before the couple knew there was going to be a massive recession coming, they had reached the point that direct marketing to masons was needed to acquire the big building projects, explained Brenda.

“At the time, we thought that some of the distributors we were selling to would land some big jobs, but I’m sorry to say that we just didn’t know how things worked. So it took a while to break into that market, because it’s scary to a mason to use a new supplier, because if a supplier can’t deliver, the consequences are grim. So, we bought a few bridge saws, thinking that if we have the equipment, the business will come. Well, we did get the business but, unfortunately, we didn’t have the building to put the equipment in and put up a 30-foot by 40-foot tent and heated it with propane to keep the water from freezing. We got through that winter and had established that we were a company that could deliver on time and our service was good. These projects also tended to be well funded and made up for a lot of the residential and landscape markets that we lost because of the economic downturn.”

Soon after, the couple took a deep breath, took stock of the situation, and built a 5,000 square-foot building to house the equipment. The smell of success was in the air, and the whirring of saw blades was everyone’s favorite tune. The company had now shifted into second gear and was gaining momentum. So much so, in fact, that two more 5,000 square-foot buildings would soon be placed on the drawing board to house the next wave of equipment that included a bridge and wire saws, a waterjet, CNCs, splitters and polishers. But, according to Bernard and Brenda, there is still not enough space to place their new waterjets and a 65-foot single head CNC polisher that are sitting under tarps. “We bought this equipment, because we needed a more automated production line,” continued Brenda. “Finding labor is getting to be more and more of a challenge, and we wanted to find ways to do more with less man power. Additionally, from that standpoint, we decided to buy other colors from other quarries to offer a more diverse inventory to our customers.”

Lyons Sandstone’s GraniRoc wire saw is their main production machine for raw block production.

Above, right: Their Simec Stratos Nesting Bridge Saw is a mutlitasking workhorse. The white boom is a camera station, allowing them to determine the most efficient way to process incoming slabs like the one on the roller bed, under the camera boom.

Lyons Sandstones uses three Park Industries machines, four Cee-Jay Splitters and many other stone processing machines.

Sales and Marketing

Lyons Sandstone currently stocks eight colors in a variety of cuts, with the most popular being their 4-inch bed depth Ashlar veneers. All can be shipped nationwide as well as internationally. Average yearly sales of dimensional stone is 13,000 tons, while stone for landscaping, rip rap, etc., totals 4,000 tons per year. The company’s sales ratio is approximately 50 percent Lyons Red, with the remaining 50 percent being their other colors. According to Brenda, Lyons Red is used a lot locally, whereas other areas, such as Kansas City, Lyons Red would look unusual, so sometimes Lyons Red doesn’t travel as far as they’d like it to.

“We are pretty much order takers,” continued Bernard, “and we are well known in what we call the Front Range, which extends from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Pueblo, Colorado. I won’t say we own that market, but most of the big projects in this area are done by two or three of the masonry contractors who ask us for quotes on those projects. So, yes, you could say we are just order takers, but the best sales tool that we have is to keep those masonry contractors happy by getting them what they need on time as the job is progressing. If we can do that, that’s going to keep us in their good graces. We also have a decent website, and we feel it is there to satisfy the people who are looking for stone for architectural projects. We also like when architects and masons from other parts of the country look at our website, but we wind up doing more retail sales than we would like to because of it. We would much rather ship our stone out on a tractor trailer than a trailer behind a pickup truck. It’s about an equal amount of effort to handle each of those different customers.”

Brenda: “Sometimes people call us because they can’t get what they are looking for from one of our distributors. So, Yeah! We get suckered into selling retail sometimes, and we kick each other when we do.”

Bernard: “If someone is interested in our stone, we don’t want to kill that interest. The more people interested, all the better. We have no sales people, but someday we do want to have our nephew, Joshua Buster, out selling to architects and to big projects. Joshua has been part of this company for fifteen years, and he is a great asset.”

According to Bernard, the company currently employs 54 personnel, with 34 being seasonal labor that stays as late as November 16, every year. Keeping production steady is high on the priority list, but keeping the good folks that produce every day is at the top of the list, he explained. “We are required by the Mining Safety and Health Association (MSHA) to do eight hours per year of mining refresher training and four hours of new employee mining training per year. Most of the accidents we have, and we do have them, are in the category of a smashed thumb from missing the wedge that they’re hammering into the rock that they’re trying to split. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our employees, and in all respects we constantly strive to create a safer workplace for them every day.”

A Prosperous Outlook with High Expectations

Bernard: “I predict that the percentage of sales of Lyons Red will continue to grow, but the other stones we have will grow even faster. We haven’t found the bottom of our quarried areas yet, either. Out of our 173 permitted acres, we’ve only quarried about fifteen. We think that the formation of Lyons Red could be 200 to 400 feet deep, but you don’t know how deep the good reserves go until you get there.”

Brenda: “Things have changed from the early days, and we are looking at the company continuing on past our active involvement in it. When Bernard and I came to Colorado and tried our hand at quarrying, our thought was that we would do it for a few years and sell it and retire, but it has gotten in our blood. We are working hard to develop more people to manage it and be able to keep growing and expanding the business, with no foreseeable end.”

Lyons Sandstone is a member of the Rocky Mountain Masonry Institute and the Natural Stone Institute (NSI).