Hiawatha National Forest
— the forest the lakes wrap around.
Not only on a wall.
Hiawatha National Forest, 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.
“Nearly 900,000 acres of pine, hemlock, and hardwood, held between Lake Superior to the north and Lakes Michigan and Huron to the south. Two units, an eastern and a western, with the Munising shoreline on one edge and the Point Iroquois light on the other. Bog, dune, and quiet inland lake, all in one forest. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Hiawatha National Forest covers roughly 894,000 acres across Michigan's eastern Upper Peninsula, managed by the U.S. Forest Service from headquarters in Gladstone. The forest is split into two non-contiguous units. The East Unit reaches from the Lake Superior shore near Sault Ste. Marie down to Lake Huron, and the West Unit runs south from Munising to Lake Michigan, making Hiawatha the only national forest in the country to touch three Great Lakes. The terrain holds pine, northern hardwood, cedar swamp, and stretches of glacially carved bog.
Water defines this forest more than ridge or summit. The Au Train and Indian rivers run cold and tannin-dark through the West Unit. Inland, more than 400 lakes sit inside the boundary, many of them shallow and reed-edged, others deeper and walleye-clear. The shoreline on the south side meets Lake Michigan in long sand beaches near Brevort, and the Lake Superior edge near Munising opens onto the painted cliffs of Pictured Rocks just outside the forest line. Six lighthouses, including the 1857 Point Iroquois light, mark the older shipping routes.
Population density across the U.P. sits below ten people per square mile, and the forest's interior roads thin quickly past the trailheads. The Rapid River and Bay de Noc cross-country ski trail systems run quiet most of the year, and the federally designated Big Island Lake and Rock River Canyon wilderness areas, totaling nearly 12,000 acres, ban motorized travel outright. Wolves returned to the U.P. in the 1990s and now hold steady packs inside Hiawatha. Even in summer the sound floor stays mostly wind in white pine and the occasional loon.
