Larimer County
Two stone quarries, thirty-seven people, and a gravel pit
Laporte sits in Larimer County and its rows are dimension stone rather than aggregate, which is unusual and changes everything downstream. Owl Canyon Quarry and its mill, run by Pete Lien and Sons, works 25 people on dimension limestone and resolves 10.7 miles out. A brownstone quarry run by Stone Wholesale works another twelve.
Thirty-seven people cutting stone, against two on the one construction sand and gravel pit filed here, a Loveland Ready Mix operation. That ratio is the wrong way round for almost anywhere else on the front range.
Dimension stone means blocks and slabs rather than tons of crushed rock, so the haulage is flatbeds and heavy haul going to a mill or a fabricator, not tippers going to a batch plant. Fewer trucks, carrying more concentrated loads, over longer distances.
A note on the records
This town is spelled two ways, and the records split on it
Those two quarry rows are filed under two different spellings of the same place name, one with a capital in the middle and one without. They sit side by side in one county and an exact string match treats them as different towns.
Read together with the neighbouring rows they make a cluster of four in Larimer County — 25 people, 12, then eight at Berthoud and three at a Loveland quarry — 48 people cutting stone within one county north of Denver. Split on the spelling and you see two small unrelated sites instead.
None of that changes what any individual truck is. It does mean a page that counted rows by name alone would understate this town by roughly a third, so the figures above are stated from coordinates rather than from spellings.
What that does to a truck
Point loads on a deck, and a long way to the customer
Both of those quarries load the same awkward way, and it leaves a mark. A block of limestone or sandstone puts its whole weight through a small patch of deck rather than spreading it the way loose aggregate does, so the trailer takes concentrated punishment that a tipper never sees.
The other half is distance. Cut stone goes to fabricators and job sites rather than to a plant a mile away, so a truck off Owl Canyon covers real ground — and unlike a gravel truck it usually comes back empty, which halves the loaded miles for the same odometer reading.
So on a stone truck the deck, the frame and the suspension tell the story, and the driveline is often in better shape than the mileage suggests. That holds across all 25 employees worth of work at the Pete Lien site and the twelve at the brownstone quarry: we look at all of it, and we ask what it hauled before we ask how far.
Colorado paperwork
The brand is stamped into the truck, not just the title
Beyond the stone, two state rules reach a sale here, and one of them marks the vehicle itself rather than the paperwork.
Colorado’s salvage rule is physical. Under C.R.S. § 42-6-136.5 a purchaser of a vehicle that has become salvage must apply for a salvage certificate of title, and an owner who makes one roadworthy again needs a certified VIN inspection under § 42-5-202. To pass that inspection the applicant has to stamp the vehicle with a brand reading Rebuilt From Salvage, each letter not less than a quarter of an inch high.
The designation then becomes a permanent part of the certificate of title and appears on every title issued for that vehicle afterwards. Two forms carry it: DR 2415 establishes a rebuilt title from a salvage title, and DR 2424 is the statement of facts. In Colorado the history does not come off, and it is not only on paper.
What the threshold for becoming salvage is, we do not state. The central rule file identifies § 42-6-102 and records that it was not read, so no Colorado percentage appears here. The gross and axle schedule is not in that file either, and neither is the chain law, which for a mountain state is the gap worth naming rather than filling.
One thing worth correcting, because it reaches trucks and is usually reported the wrong way round. Colorado adopted Advanced Clean Trucks as the eighth state, applying from model year 2027 and growing through model year 2035, and it has been under challenge since the June 2025 repeal of California’s federal waivers. It is a manufacturer sales standard. It does not require a fleet, an owner, an operator or a dealership to buy a zero-emission vehicle, and it puts no deadline on anybody’s diesel.
C.R.S. § 42-6-136.5 and § 42-5-202, with Colorado DMV forms DR 2415 and DR 2424, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on Advanced Clean Trucks. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day those were read.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Flatbeds and heavy haul off Owl Canyon Quarry and the Stone Wholesale pit. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off the Loveland Ready Mix ground. Day cabs and road tractors.
Box trucks, straight trucks, rollbacks, sleepers, tankers, car haulers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Larimer County thing in particular, they run everywhere.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Laporte
- Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
- The deck is chewed up from stone.Expected on a quarry flatbed and not a disqualifier. Point loads off a place like Owl Canyon Quarry mark a deck faster than anything else does. Tell us if the frame took any of it.
- High miles for a quarry truck.Normal on dimension stone. At 10.7 miles out and going to fabricators rather than a batch plant, these trucks cover real distance, and about half of it is empty.
- What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.
- My address is spelled the other way.Makes no difference to us. Larimer County records carry both spellings of this town and we buy across the whole of it either way.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.
Why people call
Beyond a truck that has simply done the work, the reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A stone contract finishing and the flatbed that served it having nowhere to go next.
Yards up towards Owl Canyon and out across Larimer County usually have one standing that never got its next load.
Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.