North Country Trail
— the long walk through the quiet half of the map.
Not only on a wall.
North Country Trail, 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 longest of the eleven National Scenic Trails runs nearly forty-eight hundred miles, from Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota to the Vermont border, and the Minnesota section is its quiet middle. It crosses the Chippewa and Superior National Forests, threads the bog and birch country south of the Boundary Waters, and meets Lake Superior at Jay Cooke State Park near Duluth. Trail towns like Walker, Remer, and McGregor mark the long days between resupplies. Most of the walking here is alone, between two pines, with only the through-hiker logbook at the next shelter to say someone came this way last week.
The place, in three passes.
The North Country National Scenic Trail is the longest of the eleven National Scenic Trails, running approximately 4,800 miles from Lake Sakakawea State Park in North Dakota to the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. Congress authorised it in 1980 and the National Park Service administers it in partnership with the North Country Trail Association. The Minnesota section runs roughly 875 miles and passes through Itasca State Park, the Chippewa and Superior National Forests, the Mesabi and Cuyuna iron ranges, and Jay Cooke State Park outside Duluth, where the trail meets the St. Louis River.
The Minnesota miles run through some of the emptiest country in the trail system: the tamarack bogs and jack-pine plains of the Chippewa National Forest, the long ridge-walks of the Superior, the river bottoms of the Cuyuna. Through-hiker traffic is light enough that the Border Route and Kekekabic sections through the Boundary Waters can give a walker a full day without meeting anyone. Local NCTA chapters maintain the tread and the shelters; a logbook at most major waypoints is the way you learn that someone else came through last week.
Most Minnesota hikers walk the trail from late May through early October, when the bogs are passable and the shelters are open. June brings black flies and mosquitoes in the bog country; late August through the first week of October is the quietest window, with cooler nights and the first colour in the maples around Itasca. The Border Route section is best from mid-July on, after spring melt clears the boundary lakes. Winter use is mostly snowshoe and ski near the trail-town segments; the deep-forest miles are not maintained for snow travel.
