‘Movers and shakers’ of the salt business add a mountain of sparkle to Long Beach Harbor skyline.

A great white mountain looms over Pier A in the Port of Long Beach. Bulldozers flatten its peak into a huge butte. The shiny blades dig deeply into mounds of cherry-size crystals that collect below a chute attached to an overhead conveyor belt. The chute dumps an average of 1,100 tons of crystals an hour. The bulldozer drivers struggle to keep up with the flow from a nearby ship.

“You’re beat at the end of the day. You get a good night’s sleep after this,” said Tim Fye, looking down from the cab of his Caterpillar after a morning of battling back the blinding-white tide.

This is a mountain of salt. Its ruler is the Ocean Salt Co. Inc., the self-proclaimed “movers and shakers” of the salt business. The 26-year-old firm claims to have the largest stockpile of solar-dried sea salt in the Southwest, including Southern California.

Most of the time, the massive hill steadily shrinks as trucks haul away loads of salt crystals to industrial customers. The pile grows only when the bulk carrier Conveyor arrives several times a year to deliver a load of up to 75,000 tons of salt from Mexico. Its last load two weeks ago was 62,000 tons. The mountain, which normally ranges between 100,000 and 150,000 tons, averages 40 to 50 feet in height covering 3 acres.

Dennis Gallifent, an Ocean Salt vice president, said the huge stockpile is necessary to meet the demand of the company’s varied customers.

The water-softening industry is the biggest customer, he said. Other commercial uses range from de-icing roads to making pickles, from preserving animal hides to being the primary ingredient in lower-cost detergents. The product also is used as a cattle feed.

It comes by the bag or by the truckload, in big or little crystals, dried or undried. But it is not offered by the shaker. Gallifent said that although his product is 99.8% pure, the table salt market requires expensive redissolving and redrying, and has been left to other salt companies.

The novelty of a giant pile of salt has not been lost on scene scouts from Hollywood. Gallifent said insurance considerations forced him to turn down requests from film makers who thought they had found the ideal location to shoot snow sequences. The mountain was used for a magazine advertisement, however, and made a striking prop for a jet-black sports car perched on top, he said.

The salt is delivered from huge drying beds in Guerrero Negro, a town in Baja California near the fishhook-shaped finger of land that is famous as the winter home of the migrating California gray whales. There, a company called Exportadora de Sal produces about one-third of all the salt used worldwide for commercial and industrial purposes.

The process of producing salt from seawater takes 2 years and involves a series of drying basins carved out of the sand and brush. Seawater first is pumped into a basin and left to evaporate. After a month or so, the water is pumped into another basin. Two years and a succession of ponds later, the water has evaporated, leaving a residue of crystals.

The crystals are scooped into trucks and barged to an island to be loaded aboard ships such as the 20-year-old Conveyor, especially designed for plying the salt trade on the West Coast and Japan.

The 800-foot-long ship carries up to 75,000 tons of salt in its holds. It is so large and has such a deep draft that Gallifent said his crews sometimes have had to hurry up the unloading process to keep the ship from hitting bottom at low tide in the harbor.

Capt. Francis Taphouse, a 63-year-old Englishman who has commanded a multinational crew of up to 42 aboard the Conveyor for the past 8 years, said his ship is growing “elderly” by maritime standards. But the light green bulkheads and polished interior decks are spotless. The crew hoses out the holds after every delivery of salt.

The ship is unique because of its conveyor system. Pairs of bulldozers work in each of the holds to push the salt into corner gates, where a conveyor system hoists it overhead to a chute that feeds the ever-growing pile on shore. Previously, a crane with a clamshell-type bucket was used to unload the salt.

Despite the lengthy process to transform saltwater to dry crystals, Gallifent said the mountain holds up pretty well in a hard rainfall. Rather than dissolving, the outer crystals form a hard layer on the mountain that protects most of it from the rain, he said. Still, about 5% of the mountain is lost every year to rainfall and weathering.

Bulldozer driver Fye, 38, said the salt piles up on the mountain so fast sometimes that “they’ve got to slow down the belt a little bit. Sometimes we get two dozers working side-by-side.”

He said the work is much like pushing sand around on the beach.

And on a hot, bright day, he said, the bulldozer operators have to wear sunglasses. They want to prevent salt-blindness.