Lake McConaughy
— a long blue inland sea on the high plains.
Not only on a wall.
Lake McConaughy, 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 Mac to the locals. Twenty-two miles long when it's full, with white sand beaches that wouldn't read as Nebraska to anyone who hadn't seen them. Kingsley Dam went up in 1941 across the North Platte; the lake came in behind it and became the largest reservoir in the state. Pelicans pass through in spring and fall. The water carries a clean prairie blue, paler at the shallows where the sand comes up to meet it, and the wind off the open surface keeps the summer afternoons honest. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Lake McConaughy sits in Keith County, Nebraska, about nine miles north of Ogallala on the North Platte River. The reservoir formed behind Kingsley Dam, completed in 1941 — a hydraulic-fill earthen dam built by the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District. At full pool the lake covers roughly 30,500 acres and runs about twenty-two miles end to end, the largest reservoir in Nebraska. The surrounding state recreation area protects more than seventy miles of shoreline, much of it the pale fine sand that gives the lake its distinctive beaches.
The colour reads as a clean high-plains blue, paler than a mountain reservoir and never carrying the glacial turquoise of an alpine lake. The North Platte carries fine sand and silt off the Front Range and the Sand Hills, and the slow water of the reservoir lets it settle along the shore as the white beach the lake is known for. In summer the surface temperature climbs into the seventies; in winter the shallow eastern coves freeze, and bald eagles winter below Kingsley Dam where the tailwater stays open.
Spring and fall bring migration: American white pelicans, sandhill cranes farther east along the Platte, and bald eagles concentrated below the dam in January and February. Summer is the busy season — the lake draws boaters and beach campers from across the central plains, and Independence Day weekend is the high-water mark for crowds. The shoulder months, May and September, hold the warm light without the heat or the traffic. The state recreation area is open year-round; the small visitor centre near the dam is the place to start.
