Business Built Upon Stones

In the fall of 1999, Dana Hurt found himself between the proverbial rock and a hard place. It had been a disappointing construction season and he was frustrated with his lack of prospects for more work.

Before moving to North Idaho with his wife Kelly and daughters Nikki and Hannah in September 1992, Hurt had established himself as one of the premier framing contractors in the Seattle area.

He had built high-end custom homes of 5,000 to 6,000 square feet, including several showcase houses on the “Street of Dreams.”

“I figured I’d always be able to make it in construction,” said Hurt.

What Hurt gradually came to realize was that everyone in the Panhandle owned a hammer. In spite of years of experience, he found the limited number of construction projects were spread out over the established old boys, their sons, grandsons, uncles and cousins.

Sipping a beer, Hurt sat on the beach of his property next to Lightning Creek, near Clark Fork, and tried to figure out what to do next.

Kelly was busy with her position as Social Services Director at Valley Vista Care Center in Sandpoint. The girls were at school. They all loved the area and did not want to move back to the big city.

Birds sang. The beautiful Cabinet Mountains glowed in the sunshine. The creek babbled past Hurt’s shoes.

Hurt suddenly realized that an answer to his dilemma “was staring me right in the face.”

Rock. Beautiful, washed rock. Literally tons of it all around him.

Hurts’s creative thinking went into overdrive.

“It dawned on me,” he said, “that I should be able to manufacture something with that beautiful, washed stone.”

Hurt began by soliciting major supply places. In no time he had rocks at Marenako’s Rock Center in Issaquah, Wash., at American Masonry in Spokane, at Silver Lake Masonry in Coeur d’Alene and at a supply house in Beaverton, Ore.

He eventually took over 180 tons of rock off his beach with a six-wheeled vehicle that looks “like a moon-walk machine.”

He graded the rock into four sizes and stored it on pallets lining his long driveway.

And there were still rocks to spare. “You can’t even tell that I’ve touched the beach,” he said.

When Bright Path and Coco, the family horses, needed new fencing around their pasture, Hurt had another brain wave. Rather than building a post and wire fence, he designed rock posts in such a way that wooden bars could be fitted between them.

“I experimented with about 100 failures,” Hurt said. Finally he settled on a design for rock fence posts that were beautiful as well as structurally sound. The posts contain small and medium-sized stones that are combined to make sturdy and attractive columns.

In the same dedicated manner in which he once built custom homes, Hurt perfected his innovative masonry technique before launching his new product on the market.

He called his company Earthtones. He ran ads in Log Home Living Magazine and developed a Web page: www.earthtonesfencing.com. He opened an e-mail address at earthton@televar.com.

Hurt also built a showcase rock post fence at Evergreen Hardware, on state Highway 200 on the outskirts of Clark Fork. Another showcase rock post fence is on display at American Masonry in Spokane.

From his first model ships and airplanes, to tree forts, to houses, Hurt has been naturally creative and “I always have to build,” he said.

Now it is fence posts.

“Never in my wildest dreams would I ever have thought I’d be doing this,” Hurt said. “But I really believe in this product or I wouldn’t have risked it.”