What’s going on at the old Gorst quarry?

The in basket: JoAnne Stefanac, Juliua Stroup, Natasha Champion, Barbara Peterson and John Jurgens have all e-mailed to ask about the work they see at the old Pioneer Quarry just on the Bremerton side of Gorst. 

“I can’t figure out if they’re just using all the material for other things or if they’re actually clearing and leveling the land to put something there,” said JoAnne. 

Says Juliua, “They’ve had a lot of heavy equipment and have contoured the land and have set up an arrangement of large boulders.”

The out basket: Pat Lockhart who owns the quarry alongside Highway 3 as well as the stilll-productive pit uphill from there on the other side of Sherman Heights Road, joked that it’s the new eight-lane highway between Gorst and Bremerton, plus a marina out in front when I reached him by cell phone. 

Then he got serious but not too specific about his plans. He said there still is a lot of usable rock in the lower quarry, mixed with dirt, and he’s having it screened out and taken uphill to be crushed for aggregate.

Sound Excavating, which Pat used to own and which shares the Gorst property for its headquarters, has some impressively large equipment moving the screened dirt around and leveling it into what look like a couple of commercial pads along the highway. 

But it’s just the increasingly visible phase of work he’s had going on for years, he said, and he can’t really say what it will become in time. “We’re grading it until it looks good so we can hydroseed it before winter,” he said.