Baker Lake high cirque
— the tarn the glacier left behind.
Not only on a wall.
Baker Lake high cirque, 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 small alpine tarn at roughly 10,700 feet in Great Basin National Park, sitting in a granite cirque on the south flank of Wheeler Peak. The trail in climbs from the Baker Creek trailhead through aspen and Engelmann spruce, six miles to the basin. Bristlecone pine grows on the ridges above, some of the oldest living trees on earth. The lake is quiet most of the season; it freezes in winter and reopens slowly with snowmelt. No road reaches it. The wind off Wheeler comes down the headwall most afternoons. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Baker Lake sits at roughly 10,700 feet in a glacial cirque on the south side of Wheeler Peak, the second-highest summit in Nevada at 13,065 feet. It lies within Great Basin National Park in White Pine County, established in 1986 and centered on the South Snake Range. The lake is reached only on foot, by a roughly six-mile trail from the Baker Creek trailhead off the main park road near Baker, Nevada. The basin is one of several cirques carved into the range during the Pleistocene; the small Wheeler Peak Glacier, the only true glacier in the Great Basin, still holds on the north side of the same massif.
The South Snake Range is one of the most remote sub-ranges in the contiguous United States. The nearest town, Baker, has a population of roughly seventy, and the nearest interstate, I-80 at Wendover, is more than two hours north. Great Basin draws fewer than 150,000 visitors a year, less than a typical summer day at Zion, and most of those visitors stay on the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive or in the Lehman Caves area. The Baker Lake cirque is past the day-hike crowd. The basin is also designated International Dark Sky country, with some of the darkest measured night skies in the lower forty-eight.
The Baker Lake trail typically clears of snow in early July and holds passage through October, depending on the year. The Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive, which carries most of the trailhead traffic in the upper park, is generally open from late May or June through November and closed by snow above the Upper Lehman Creek area in winter. Wildflowers in the cirque peak in late July and early August. The lake freezes by November and stays under ice and snow into late spring. The bristlecone grove on the ridges above is reachable from the same drainage via an adjoining trail.
