Gooseberry Falls Middle Falls
— the picture every North Shore drive stops for.
Not only on a wall.
Gooseberry Falls Middle 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.
“The Middle Falls of the Gooseberry River, a stepped drop of dark basalt a short walk from the visitor center off Highway 61. This is the picture every North Shore drive stops for: the river breaks into two main courses across a ledge, and a stone-bridge overlook frames it from above. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the late 1930s, the bridge is part of the view as much as the water is. Heavy in May, lace-thin in August. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Gooseberry Falls State Park lies on Minnesota's North Shore in Lake County, about 13 miles northeast of Two Harbors along Highway 61. The Gooseberry River steps down through Upper, Middle, and Lower Falls within a half-mile of the visitor center. The Middle Falls is the most photographed of the three — a wide, two-course drop directly below the highway bridge and the CCC-built stone arches. The state park was established in 1937 and is among the oldest in Minnesota's system.
Two kinds of stone make this view. The dark, fractured ledges over which the river breaks are basalt from the Midcontinent Rift, laid down by lava flows roughly 1.1 billion years ago. The bridges and stairs are coursed local stone laid by the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1934 and 1941, a craft program that built much of the early infrastructure across the North Shore parks. The two stones meet at the overlook in a way that reads as one thought.
A Minnesota state-park vehicle permit is required at the gate. The visitor center sits just off Highway 61, and the Middle Falls overlook is reached by a paved spur of a few hundred feet, the most accessible viewpoint in the park. A wider Falls Loop continues across the CCC stone bridge and down through Lower Falls. Early morning in summer is the quietest window; the parking lot fills by late morning on weekends through July and August.
