A handful of home-schooled students stood above a conveyer belt Friday inside a large building at Western Excelsior in Mancos as a large piece of machinery roared to life.
As the students stood in awe, they watched aspen logs being shaved into excelsior, the stuff the plant on the western edge of Mancos is famous for.
Ray Bolles, a longtime veteran at Western Excelsior, grabbed some of the stuff and showed it to the kids.
"Wow," most of them said, as they watched logs turned into the fiber that Western Excelsior turns into erosion control products and even swamp cooler pads.
For the first time, Wester Excelsior opened its doors to the public and employees' families for Manufacturing Day, a national day aimed at highlighting manufacturing jobs.
"This is our first time participating," said Kyle Hanson, Western Excelsior's business unit manager. "Nationwide, there are about 1,500 manufacturing plants doing this today."
About 90 people toured the plant, and Hanson said he plans to bring it back next year.
Participants were treated to tours, hay rides, music, a barbecue lunch, candy and ice cream.
"From our point of view, it was awesome," Hanson said.
Hanson said he and the 100 employees enjoyed showing off their work.
"I was just so excited for the employees," Hanson said. "What they do is not easy, and they watched people come through, and those people were listening to them talk and finding what they do every day interesting. If you aren't careful, there can be a stigma associated with working in a manufacturing plant. But after Friday, there was a great sense of pride."
According to National Manufacturing Day organizers, the day started as a grass-roots movement to help with a growing problem.
"The most pressing issue is a gap in skilled labor. Eighty percent of manufacturers cannot find the skilled workers they need. This gap continues to widen. Manufacturers' ability to address this issue has been hindered by the public perception that careers in manufacturing are undesirable by insufficient preparatory education. Both these problems stem from a lack of understanding of present-day manufacturing environments," Manufacturing Day Producers stated in a press release.
Hanson said that couldn't be farther from the truth. His employees often solve problems and design equipment.
To illustrate this, the plant tour was filled with educational stops, some of which had challenges for participants, one of which involved using large square metal tubing called "flex craft" to solve a problem.
"It's like a big boys erector set," said Matthew Betts.
Betts challenged children to design a structure that would support a drainage tube, yet allow drainage.
Ryan Benally, 13, took the day off school to see the plant that his dad, Eugene Henry, has worked at for three years.
He came from New Mexico with his family.
"It's great, and the challenges are fun," Benally said.
Tilda Henry, Benally's mother, agreed.
"This tour is very informational," she said.
Justin Ross, of Bayfield, signed up for the tour and brought along his home-schooled children.
"It's fantastic," he said. "We heard about the tour and thought it would be educational."
Even at the end of the tour, his kids were grinning.
"They make blankets," one kid said with excitement, of the erosion-control products.
"I loved seeing the big saws," Rylan Ross, 13, said.
Hanson hopes to get more community members involved next year and make the tours a bit shorter. Some of the tours were well over an hour long.
Tour participants saw how bark was taken off the aspen logs, how the logs were cut into smaller pieces, how the logs were shaved, how the excelsior was baled, how it was then turned into blankets, and how straw was made into logs, called "wattles." They also learned about how the by products from the manufacturing process was used. Sawdust is turned into wood pellets; and bark, into cattle feed.
"What they do is not easy," Hanson said. "But it is also very interesting."