Pictured Rocks Spray Falls
— the creek that walks off the edge into the lake.
Not only on a wall.
Pictured Rocks Spray Falls, 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 small creek that runs out of the woods and then, with no warning, walks off the edge of the cliff. Seventy feet of water down the sandstone face directly into Lake Superior. There is no road to it. The clean view is from the deck of a boat coming east out of Munising, or from a narrow overlook on the Lakeshore Trail about a mile north of the Chapel Beach turnoff. Most days the spray catches the sun before the water reaches the lake.
The place, in three passes.
Spray Falls sits inside Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, about midway between Munising and Grand Marais on Michigan's Upper Peninsula coast. Spray Creek runs through the northern hardwood forest and reaches the cliff edge with no apron between, dropping roughly seventy feet down the Cambrian sandstone directly into Lake Superior. The Lakeshore was designated in 1966 and protects 73,000 acres of cliff, beach, and forest. The closest land access is the Lakeshore Trail above Chapel Beach, a segment of the North Country National Scenic Trail.
The fall is one of the few in the Midwest that drops straight into a Great Lake. Spray Creek is small, so the flow narrows in late summer and broadens in the spring snowmelt, when it reads as a clean white sheet against the rust and ochre of the cliff. The Superior shelf below the fall hides the wreck of the Mary Jarecki, a wooden steamer lost in 1883, now a registered dive site for technical divers out of Munising. The water at the base stays close to forty degrees most of the year.
There is no road to Spray Falls. The two practical views are by boat out of Munising, with cruises and kayak outfitters running roughly mid-May through mid-October, or on foot via the Lakeshore Trail with the overlook about a mile northeast of the Chapel Basin trailhead. The land overlook is small and looks down on the top of the fall, not across it. Backcountry permits are required for overnight stays at the Chapel Beach camp. Winter closes the access road entirely.
