Q: Quarry (Sandstone Quarry)

From 1905 to 1912, Sandstone Quarry within Red Rock Canyon was used by various owners & companies to extract large pieces of high quality beige & orange sandstone to use for buildings in Los Angeles & San Francisco. Laborers used drills, metal wires, and bolts to cut rectangular pieces out of the Calico Hills. Large steam-engine tractors were used to transport heavy stone from the quarry to the railroad in Las Vegas along primitive rocky roads, roughly a 20 mile one-way journey. The business & transportation operations proved to be quite costly and never provided the profit owners were seeking, causing the commercial mining of Sandstone Quarry to end in 1912. Today, you can still walk along and picnic near the giant sandstone cuts and imagine the hard labor that occurred to create and move those heavy sandstone blocks.

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