Porcupine Mountains escarpment
— the long basalt spine the glaciers left standing.
Not only on a wall.
Porcupine Mountains escarpment, 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 billion-year-old basalt ridge running for miles above the south shore of Lake Superior, holding one of the largest old-growth hardwood tracts left east of the Mississippi. The Ojibwe called the range Kag-wadjiw, the crouching porcupine. Sixty thousand acres of state wilderness, and the Escarpment Trail walks the whole quiet length of it. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Porcupine Mountains escarpment is the south rim of a basalt formation in Michigan's western Upper Peninsula, lifted by the Midcontinent Rift roughly 1.1 billion years ago. The ridge sits within Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, the largest state park in Michigan at over 60,000 acres, and overlooks Lake of the Clouds in the valley below. The Escarpment Trail runs four miles between the Government Peak trailhead and the overlook on M-107, holding open views west across the Carp River valley toward Lake Superior.
The park protects roughly 35,000 acres of old-growth northern hardwood — sugar maple, eastern hemlock, yellow birch — one of the largest unlogged tracts left in the Midwest. No paved road runs through the interior. Black bear, fisher, and northern goshawk live here. The 1945 state-park designation came after a citizen campaign by the Save the Porcupine Mountains Association stopped a wartime logging contract that would have cleared the ridge. Wind in the hemlocks is most of what you hear up on the escarpment.
The escarpment is most often photographed in early October, when the sugar maple canopy turns above the basalt. Peak colour usually arrives the first week of the month and holds for ten to fourteen days, depending on the year's first hard frost. The park stays open year-round, but M-107 to the Lake of the Clouds overlook closes to cars after the first heavy snow, usually in mid-November, and reopens in late April. Winter access is by ski and snowshoe from the South Boundary Road.
