Black River Falls Sandstone
— the river working a sandstone shelf, one ledge at a time.
Not only on a wall.
Black River Falls Sandstone, 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.
“One of five named falls along the Black River as it drops toward Lake Superior. Sandstone is the quiet one, a broad slip of tea-coloured water sliding over a layered shelf, the kind of falls that asks you to sit rather than stand. The Black River National Forest Scenic Byway threads the whole string, ending at the harbour where the river finally lets go. People come for Rainbow and Potawatomi and find they remember this one. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Black River rises in the western Upper Peninsula and runs north through Gogebic County into Lake Superior at Black River Harbor. The Black River National Forest Scenic Byway, a 15-mile spur off US-2 at Bessemer, follows the lower river through the Ottawa National Forest and crosses a chain of five named falls — Great Conglomerate, Potawatomi, Gorge, Sandstone, and Rainbow — in the final two miles before the harbour. Sandstone Falls drops over a stepped shelf of soft sedimentary rock the river has been undercutting since the last glaciation. A short footpath from the byway parking lot reaches the overlook in under ten minutes.
The colour reads bronze in low water, almost black where the current deepens — tannin from the spruce and cedar swamps upstream, the same chemistry that darkens rivers across the Lake Superior watershed. Spring runoff and the weeks after a hard rain are when the shelf at Sandstone really moves; midsummer drops the flow to a steady slip you can hear from the trail before you see it. Local guides recommend the byway loop in late September, when the maples along the gorge turn and the low sun finds the tea-coloured water at the lip of each ledge.
All five falls sit within a two-mile stretch of the Black River National Forest Scenic Byway at the end of County Road 513, reached from Bessemer on US-2. Sandstone is the fourth fall north, between Gorge and Rainbow, with its own marked pull-off and a short staircase to the overlook. The North Country National Scenic Trail runs the river's east bank and links all five falls plus the suspension bridge at Black River Harbor. No fee. The byway is plowed only as far as the Copper Peak access in winter; the lower falls trails close with the snow.
