Lake Winnibigoshish
— a wide water, walleye dark.
Not only on a wall.
Lake Winnibigoshish, 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.
“Big Winnie, the anglers call it. Roughly fifty-eight thousand acres of shallow, wind-swept water in the Chippewa National Forest, north of Grand Rapids. The Mississippi runs through it. The shoreline is mostly forest and reservation land of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, with a handful of small resorts and a Corps of Engineers dam at the southeast outlet. Famous as a walleye lake. On a calm morning the whole surface goes copper and the loons carry across it. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Lake Winnibigoshish sits in Cass and Itasca counties in north-central Minnesota, inside the Chippewa National Forest. The lake covers about 58,000 acres, making it the fourth-largest lake entirely within Minnesota. The Mississippi River, only about 80 river miles downstream from its source at Lake Itasca, flows in from the west and out the southeast through the Winnibigoshish Dam, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1884 to regulate flow on the upper Mississippi. The name comes from the Ojibwe Wiinibiigoonzhish, roughly miserable, dirty water, for the wind-stirred shallows.
Big Winnie averages only about 15 feet deep with a maximum near 70, which is why a north wind can stand the lake up in a hurry. Walleye is the headline fish; the Minnesota DNR has tracked Winnibigoshish as a top-tier walleye fishery for decades, with strong year classes off the wind-fed forage base. Yellow perch, jumbo perch, northern pike, and muskellunge also hold here. Tamarack Bay and Sugar Bay on the north end are the named shelters when the main lake is up.
Most of the shoreline belongs to the Chippewa National Forest or the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Reservation, which keeps the lake free of the wall-to-wall cabin development you see further south. The Leech Lake Band's traditional name for the lake is part of a wider Ojibwe map of the upper Mississippi headwaters that predates the Corps dam by centuries. After Labor Day the resorts on the north shore quiet down and the lake belongs to the wind, the eagles, and a small number of late-season walleye anglers in heavy coats.
