Vegas Rock: Natural In The Desert
By K. Schipper
JEAN, Nev. – For travelers on Interstate 15, this is a place for cheap gas and taking a roadside turn at the gaming tables, just over the hill from the high-pressure glitz of Las Vegas.
Few of them will ever know that a dozen miles west, and out of sight of traffic, a unique form of quartzite is quarried. Processed mainly in Jean, it’s then sent out as everything from slabs for countertops and vanities to crushed stone for landscaping.
Click photo to enlargeWhat makes the stone – dubbed meta-quartzite – unique is its composition: 99-percent pure silica granules bound together by quartz. The quartz gives it a hardness of 6.2 to 6.7, and the ability to be polished.
Geologists who’ve studied the deposit believe there’s nothing quite like it, and each fabricated product is essentially a one-of-a-kind slab or tile that can’t easily be reproduced as to color, pattern or internal fabric.
“Tiles and slabs with more or less the same colors can be produced from blocks of stone, but the internal pattern and color distribution are different in most every piece,” says Dan Rhoades, director of Las Vegas-based Las Vegas Rock, parent company of the operation.
“The artistic quality of the stone makes it important for architectural applications that require exclusivity and non-reproducible stonework of pleasing color variation and pattern.”
Las Vegas Rock has 320 acres in patented land and more than 600 additional acres in approved-but-unpatented mining claims at the site.
Las Vegas Rock began developing the meta-quartzite deposits in 1991. However, Rhoades says that, beginning at the turn of the last century, small-time miners would head out from Las Vegas to pull out flagstones and boulders for decorative purposes.
“We’re the first ones who went in with heavy equipment and started mining,” Rhoades says. “The two owners of the company and the person who held the mining claims on the land would go out there to get away from Las Vegas and they came up with the idea they should start loading boulders and selling, ‘rocks in the desert,’ which was the term they used.
“They started loading the really nice ones – the multi-colored ones and those with swirls – and it just took off from there.”
The excavation is known as the Rainbow Quarries, and with good reason. The main 50-acre quarry and several satellites produce stone in a range of colors, including pink, rainbow, rainbow gold, burgundy and peaches-and-cream.
“Our color range is very broad,” says Rhoades. “The veins we mine are constantly changing.”
Las Vegas Rock has two subsidiaries to market its various products, Aquarius Stone Products and Nevada Stone. The latter handles the polished, specialty stone (signage) and structural stone.
