By Terray Sylvester
The Sopris Sun

For the first time since it reopened in 1990, operations at the Yule Marble Quarry just south of Marble have ceased for the winter, or at least the last few months of it.
The culprit behind the closure is the usual one: a down economy that has disrupted the construction market and sapped demand for the delicately veined, cool white marble that has been cut from the quarry as far back as the late 1800s.
Citing the added expenses of wintertime operations, Polycor Stone Corp., which currently owns the mine, officially halted operations on Jan. 29. Fifteen people have been laid off, and though the company hopes to reopen the mine in the spring, the closure is a sign of the uncertainty that has crept into what had been a steady source of employment.
Polycor has operated the quarry year-round since it purchased it in 2004, but until the economy recovers, the mine may operate only on a project-by-project basis, as demand dictates.
“It’s just a temporary closure,” said Polycor Vice President Francois Darmayan. “We are hoping to be able to work in the summer and quarry the amount of stone we need. Maybe by the summer, if we are lucky enough and the economy is better, we can keep the quarry open.”
This isn’t the first time the quarry has closed. It shut down completely between 1941 and 1990, then passed through a handful of owners before being purchased by Polycor. But for now, supply has outpaced demand, explained Kimberley Perrin, who worked as a production assistant at the mine. So Polycor won’t be spending the added money required to operate in the winter.
In the cold months, the company must heat the active portion of the mine to at least 34 degrees Fahrenheit, she said. That heat comes at a significant cost: the price of about 3,000 gallons of propane per month.
“That’s just a huge expense,” said Perrin, who has worked at the quarry for eight years. “If you can imagine heating a rock cavern that is 300 by 300 by 300 feet…”
The company also must keep the road to the quarry clear of snowfall and avalanches. Quarry employees plow the road themselves, but the company hires a contractor to clear slides, which can easily take a week, entailing added expenses.
Until now the demand for the marble from Marble has made the quarry something of an anomaly, at least in comparison to Polycor’s other mines. The Quebec-based business owns about 30 granite, marble and limestone quarries. Most are in Canada, the rest are in the United States. All but one of them open and close in response to demand.  
“Most them are open upon need. So they are just open when we have projects,” Darmayan said. “Marble was one of the only ones open year-round. It is a beautiful stone – the most beautiful marble in the whole world – which is how we could survive until now with an expensive quarry at 10,000 feet.”
But things have changed.
Perrin said that the North American marble market has “suffered hugely” with the economic downturn. Some of the quarry’s major customers are stone distributors in the U.S. and Europe, and their pool of customers has shrunk, particularly in the U.S.
“Their sales have dried up and, literally, they had no way to pay their invoices to Polycor,” Perrin said. “We’re looking at having product out there and money not coming back in quickly enough.”
Though the quarry’s marble has been used for major projects such as, historically, the Lincoln Memorial and, more recently, a skyscraper in the United Arab Emirates, much of the stone these days is used for more mundane items – kitchen countertops in particular, Darmayan said.
Now, buyers appear to be settling for cheaper alternatives.
“When people look at buying custom products for their home whether it’s slab or tile or whatever, they say, ‘Hmm, should we do laminate or should we do marble? Let’s do laminate and we’ll replace it in five years,’” Perrin said
Polycor began to see demand drop in 2008, and by last year, sales were between a third and a quarter of what they were in 2007. The quarry sold about 120,000 cubic feet of stone in 2007, but only about 40,000 in 2009, Darmayan explained.
Though the crew at the quarry recognized they were working in a volatile industry, the closure has come as a surprise, said Gary Bascom, who has worked just about every job in the quarry over the last 20 years.
“They [the workers] were surprised by it, but they weren’t angry. We’re like any construction business … it depends on the market,” said Bascom, who was employed as safety director under Polycor. “And when things went south about a year, year and a half ago … we didn’t feel it right off. But we could start seeing it, a little bit less here and there. We thought we’d be able to ride it out.”
“We’re hoping right now that this is just temporary,” he added. ”But it’ll be a pretty long time even if we only have to shut down for a couple months.”
Though he couldn’t predict how many jobs will be available, or how much stone will need to be produced when the quarry eventually reopens, Darmayan stated that applications from former employees will be considered first.
But Bascom and Perrin said that many other members of the crew aren’t waiting around.
“A lot of the guys that lived on the other side of the pass, a lot of them will [leave the area] because I heard from all of them that there’s just no one hiring,” Bascom said. “There’s no jobs over there in the Paonia and Delta area.”
Welders, electricians, mechanics, heavy-equipment operators – the quarry workers possess resumes that cross over well with oil and gas work, but with energy development down around the local region, few of those jobs are available to newly laid-off miners.
Bascom and Perrin said they intend to stay in the area until the spring, though neither had a plan for the interim.
For his part, Bascom is hoping the spring thaw will come early, and that by April he and other workers will be driving up the road to pump snowmelt from the quarry again, and keep it, as he put it, “a nice place to work.”