Bremerton's Ueland Tree Farm opens newest rock quarry while closing another
BREMERTON — Colorful string-like tubes covered Ueland Tree Farm's new football-field-sized rock quarry Wednesday. Attached to explosive powder drilled into a massive chunk of basalt, the tubing led to a detonator in the hands of Tim Fredericks, an explosives engineer.
"Fire in the hole!" yelled Fredericks of Chehalis-based McCallum Rock Drilling. "There she goes!"
In an instant, a thunderous boom echoed through the forest of firs, hemlocks and cedars, followed by a cascade of rock debris.
The explosion marked a time of transition for Ueland Tree Farm, as crews crumble basalt deposited by a volcano billions of years ago that will soon form the roads, homes and other developments on the Kitsap Peninsula and surrounding region.
On the other end of the Ueland property, the mining operation at the original rock quarry Craig Ueland purchased in 2004 is coming to a close. Dating back more than 60 years, about 1.2 million yards of material was excavated from that site. Today, dump truck after dump truck rumbles in, each stuffed with rock from construction sites that are now filling in a gaping hole in the ground, not far from Werner Road in Bremerton.
"That rock helped build a lot of the infrastructure that created Kitsap County," said Mark Mauren, Ueland's property manager.
The rock quarry is the economic driver for the tree farm to go with some selective logging. The property also includes a trail network open to the public. In 2010, Craig Ueland purchased 470 acres of land west of Kitsap Lake to go with the existing 1,700 acres he'd already purchased in 2004 from Port Blakely Tree Farm.
The new rock quarry was not without community opposition. An initial plan involved using Northlake Way for rock truck transport, but neighbors voiced concerns of noise, damage and pollution the trucks would cause. So instead, Ueland constructed a new road south, which punches through to Werner Road in Bremerton.
To do that required a property swap. In 2014, the Bremerton City Council traded city land, including Heins Lake, to Ueland for a forested piece of land closer to the city's main water supply at Casad Dam and the headwaters of the Union River. That gave Ueland the room it needed to build the road from its south entrance and offices near Werner Road northward through its property to the new quarry locations.
Ueland's use of Werner Road, combined with the nearby 339-home Harbor Custom Homes development, is likely to strain the thoroughfare. In 2025, the city will begin planning to widen the road and add signals in an estimated $7.7 million project, according to Shane Weber, the city's transportation engineer.
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The new quarry locations on the north end of Ueland's property, OK'd following long regulatory processes in the 2000s and 2010s, won't be near as big as the one closing on the south. Those quarries will last about 10 years. To get to the basalt, they require explosive powder to be drilled into the basalt formations below, so they can be broken into pieces and eventually made into gravel and used in new construction projects mostly around the peninsula.
At the most basic level, "We're turning big rocks into smaller rocks," said Darin Pierson, a project manager for McCallum.
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Ueland Tree Farm opens newest rock quarry while closing another
