A North Fork Valley roofer with more than five decades of experience is heading to Yellowstone National Park, after his custom metal shingles were selected for a historic preservation project at Fort Yellowstone.
“My name is Steve Clisset,” he said in a recent interview. “I do a lot of different things, but in reference to this particular query, I’m a roofer — I have 52 years’ experience in the industry.”
Clisset said he’s worked with “pretty much every material there is” and has invented “a bunch of different practical efficiency items.” One of those inventions — a metal roofing product called Dragon Armor — will soon top 14 buildings in one of the country’s most iconic national parks.
“It’s a trademark product,” he said. “We call it Dragon Armor because people who were seeing some of the work that we did were saying, ‘Oh, it looks like dragon scales.’”
“It’s a diamond-shaped shingle,” he explained. “And that in particular is why we ended up getting selected… because our product is almost identical to what they have up there, though that was installed in like 1910.”
Clisset first learned about the Yellowstone opportunity through an unsolicited message. “Someone just reached out to me having done some investigation on the Internet and they saw our stuff and they asked me about it,” he recalled. “And we were talking and they said, ‘Well, this might be the perfect shingles for doing what we’re doing.’”
The project — a full historic restoration — was postponed and rebid, but Clisset stayed with it. “I just kind of kept being persistent,” he said. “I called the contracting officer or emailed her or did everything I could.”
Eventually, that persistence got him in touch with the specifying architect. “Because of my experience, I know a lot. I was able to help them understand things a little bit better,” he said.
The buildings are located near Mammoth Hot Springs, which raised concerns about air quality and corrosion. “There were some pretty major concerns about the impacts of the chemicals in the air around the project,” Clisset said. “So I ended up getting them in touch with a coating company… that has been approved for the project.”
“We’re going to actually have the raw material custom coated to meet those parameters and then we’ll fabricate from that.”
His company operates from a shop near Paonia. “We have a shop that’s located just outside of Paonia, although we technically have a Hotchkiss address,” Clisset said. “We’re about a mile west of Delicious Orchards on Highway 133.”
“We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 5 people who work for us plus myself and my working partner as well as a managing partner,” he said. “So it’s about eight of us total right now and we will need people to work with us up in Yellowstone.”
The Yellowstone project includes 14 buildings, many of them historic officer quarters. “If folks want to see, they can just look up Yellowstone Fort Yellowstone Restoration and they’ll see pictures of it.”
Clisset also shared a final thought for listeners. “I’m a musician as well. And that’s a common thing in this valley where people are,” he said. “It’s probably a place that has easily the most artists per capita of any place I’ve ever been.”
“We smile most days when we do this,” he added.
