Randy Zieber’s BC Stone Yard

Randy Zieber’s BC Stone Yard

Yes, it’s winter in the Pacific Northwest. The forecast is for periods of rain mixed with snow showers and the wind is downright bone chilling ugly. This is definitely not the time to be sloshing through a stone yard looking for something to carve if spring ever gets here. But is that really true? Maybe it’s the perfect time to amble along, taking your time sorting through thousands of stones lined up in orderly, dry, perfectly windless rows.

Perhaps you’ve known for years about such a place. I just found out about one two months ago, when Woody Morris, Terry Slaton and I took a road trip to see Randy Zieber’s warehouse basement stone yard in Vancouver, BC. Okay, this time the day happened to be one of those rare December days that are like a melody. It was almost warm and the sun had the sky to itself. We were treated to not only seeing the whole city of Vancouver, but also the snow covered high country that hems it in to the north and the west.

It was almost a shame to walk out of the sun and down the ramp into Randy’s concrete cave system of stone bins. But, of course, the stone had its magnetic affect on our lode Randy rents two isles in what looks like a lower level of a parking garage. But every Saturday, when the neighbors are elsewhere, he jumps on his electric fork lift, pulling out dozens of his 4 foot cubical bins to line the “roadway” with them.

That’s when the fun begins. Now we can get at the alabaster and chlorite, the marble and the limestone, and tons more whose names we don’t even know yet.

We had mainly come for the blue, Spanish alabaster. Sue Taves had a piece of it on her work bench at the Freeland Art Studios on Whidbey Island, that Woody and I had drooled enviably over each time we passed by. We bought two or three hundred pounds of it.

We also got some of what Randy calls White Crystal and White Cloud: lovely translucent stuff or puffy off-white clouds in a clear matrix. With a few other stones filling out our order, it was time to weigh them up. Randy has a digital scale. Stack on some stones: 245# on the dial. Then you zero the dial and add some more: 360# on the dial. Zero it again and…you get the idea. This could go on all afternoon.

Hands were shaken, checks were written, good-byes were said and we headed for the border, leaving Randy with a couple of other customers who stopped by, and the job of putting it all back into his two aisles when the sun eventually went down on this glorious Saturday.
By the way, if you’re from the states, you’ll have to take your purchases through customs at the border.
And though our border guard fussed a little about what we were going to do with the stone, Randy tells us that, “any ‘Canadian’ stone or other Canadian product, for that matter, is covered under NAFTA and will always be duty free.”

The ride home took some time, but we were aglow with anticipation for what we might pull out of these new stones. And thank you, Randy, for doing all that you do. For all the outside finding and mining, for the buying, the wrestling around of the pallets and the tonnage. But mostly for lining it all up under cover in the dry and pleasant twilight of your BC warehouse basement stone yard.

Go to Randy’s website at neolithicstone.com for more information about the stone and tools that he sells.