Ione Valley sage flats
— sage as far as the road carries.
Not only on a wall.
Ione Valley sage flats, 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 long basin running north-south below the Shoshone Mountains, with the old mining camp of Ione at its head and a graded county road for a spine. The flats are sage, rabbitbrush, and shadscale; the ground crunches underfoot in summer. Pronghorn cross the road in single file. Late in the day the range to the east holds the last light while the valley floor goes quiet and blue. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Ione Valley runs roughly north-south in northern Nye County, central Nevada, bounded on the east by the Shoshone Mountains and on the west by the Paradise Range. At its head sits Ione, a tiny former mining community established in the 1860s during the silver rush. The valley drains into the broader Reese River system. Access is via State Route 844 east of US-50, which crosses the range to Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park on the far side of the Shoshones.
Valley-floor elevations sit around 5,400 to 5,800 feet, with surrounding peaks climbing past 9,000 feet in the Shoshones. The air is dry, the visibility long, and the temperature swings of the high desert are wide; summer afternoons run hot, summer nights cool quickly. The dominant vegetation is sagebrush, with patches of shadscale and greasewood on the alkaline flats and willow along the small drainages.
Ione's resident population is in the single digits, and there are no settlements of any size for many miles. The road sees a handful of vehicles a day outside of hunting season. Pronghorn antelope are common across the flats, and wild horses are seen in the basin. Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, just over the Shoshone divide, preserves the abandoned 1900s mining camp of Berlin and a fossil bed of marine reptiles from the Triassic.
