Canyon Lake
— the desert holding a long blue ribbon.
Not only on a wall.
Canyon Lake, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A reservoir held between saguaro-lined cliffs on the old Apache Trail, an hour east of Phoenix. Mormon Flat Dam pinched the Salt River here in 1925 and the canyon filled. A small steamboat still works the bends past Dolly Steamboat's dock. The water is improbably blue against the rust of the walls. Coyotes drink at the edges before dawn.
The place, in three passes.
Canyon Lake sits along State Route 88, the historic Apache Trail, roughly forty miles east of Phoenix within the Tonto National Forest. It was created in 1925 when the Salt River Project completed Mormon Flat Dam, a 350-foot concrete arch impounding the Salt River. The reservoir runs about ten miles long with 28 miles of shoreline against the cliffs of the Goldfield and Superstition ranges. Boating, the Dolly Steamboat tour, and the Boulder Recreation Site sit on its north shore. Saguaro and palo verde line the rim above the water.
The blue belongs to the river the dam pinched off. The Salt River carries snowmelt from the White Mountains down through a sequence of four reservoirs — Roosevelt, Apache, Canyon, and Saguaro — that supply most of metropolitan Phoenix. Canyon Lake's surface sits around 1,660 feet, deep enough in places to stay cool through the summer. Bighorn sheep cross the slopes to drink. The Salt River Project, founded in 1903 under the federal Reclamation Act, still manages the chain. Bald eagles winter on the cliffs above the upper reaches.
The Apache Trail to Canyon Lake is a sixty-mile loop east from Apache Junction along SR 88, partly paved and partly narrow. The Dolly Steamboat departs from a small marina near Boulder Recreation Site and runs a ninety-minute nature cruise twice daily in season. A Tonto National Forest day-use pass covers parking. The road past Tortilla Flat closes seasonally after monsoon damage. Best light comes mid-morning, when the eastern walls glow and the water turns cobalt against the rust.
