I was tooling around Lincoln yesterday gathering information on the things we’d need for the new CDC Playground. Don’t tell Lauren. She thinks I watch West Wing all day. One of the most pressing answers I needed was, “What does a ton of boulders look like?”
You buy landscaping boulders by the ton, but I didn’t have a good understanding of what that looked like. So I went to a landscaping company and asked how much boulder I could get for $190.00 (which looks like the standard price for a ton of granite boulders in Lincoln Nebraska).
He had a kid (which now means anyone under 30 years old) meet me at the boulder pile and said kid pointed to rocks, um, I mean boulders, and said how much they weighed. Turns out a basketball-sized boulder is about 100 lbs. So you’d get 20 of them for $190. But if you double the size, the volume is 8 times as large, so you’d only get 2-ish of those for $190.
Pricing for granite is also interesting. Granite boulders are $90 a ton in Denver (which makes sense, because that’s where they make boulders). It is $60 a ton in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. More expensive than granite (well, everything is here) is moss-covered boulders, which we had aplenty in Missouri.
In fact, we couldn’t give away rocks in Missouri. We had to (okay, I only remember doing this once) pick up rocks out of fields and put them in piles. Not to later sell them for $3.00 each. Just so they could be in a pile.
I think the rocks were happier in piles.