Pisgah Stone busy crushing, looking to expand out West

Pisgah Stone’s Zeb Reay, operating a WA500 loader, feeds the operation’s CS3055 jaw crusher. Photo: P&Q Staff

Pisgah Stone Products has been crushing a high-grade limestone in Wellsville, Utah, for several years. But when company leaders initially sought to ramp up their operation on Mount Pisgah, they weren’t interested in a brand-new plant.

Instead, Pisgah Stone wanted to track down a used plant that was just a year or two old.

“With crushing, people don’t just have it for a year and then give it up,” says Mark Hansen, who handles equipment sales at Goodfellow Corporation. 

Well, usually they don’t. Fortunately for Pisgah Stone, it got lucky when another company’s bankruptcy made available a two-year-old spread that included a jaw crusher, two cone crushers, stackers and a control van. The spread quickly found a new home at Pisgah Stone by way of Goodfellow.

“We have so much inventory out there, but we got lucky,” Hansen says. “It’s having enough irons in the fire that that kind of thing happens.”

Off and running

The spread, which now consists of a CS3055 jaw crusher and two K400 cone crushers, produces 500 to 600 tph for Pisgah Stone. Pisgah Stone upsized its jaw a couple of years ago from the original 3144 model, and the operation is eventually planning to expand with a third cone to produce even more tonnage. Beyond that, the plan is to put in a stationary plant.

The more imminent expansion involving that third cone crusher, however, will come when Pisgah Stone has downtime. When visited last fall, downtime was something the operation had not been afforded of late.

“They want to be shut down and revamping and expanding, but they’re selling material so fast that they can’t shut down,” Hansen says.

Twin K400 cone crushers, including this one, are within the Pisgah Stone spread. Photo: P&Q Staff

Bright future

Situated at an elevation of about 6,800 ft., winters on Mount Pisgah can be treacherous. One of the first things company leaders did years ago to prepare the mountain operation was to improve a road leading up to the pit area. A scale went in from there, and a track-mounted screen followed to open the pit up.

Finding the right day-to-day leaders was a big step, as well. Pisgah Stone has those in Zeb Reay and Coby Reay – brothers who worked for other aggregate producers in the region prior to arriving at Pisgah Stone. With hundreds of years of reserves in place on the mountain, the Reay brothers have plenty of stone available to feed their Goodfellow-provided plant.