Rancho San Rafael Regional Park
— the meadow under a thousand balloons before dawn.
Not only on a wall.
Rancho San Rafael Regional Park, 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 wide green bowl on the western edge of Reno, the kind of city park the city plans its calendar around. The Great Reno Balloon Race lifts from this meadow the second weekend of September, more than a hundred envelopes catching first light over the Truckee Meadows. The rest of the year the lawns belong to dog walkers, the May Arboretum, and the slow climb of Peavine Peak in the west. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Rancho San Rafael is a 595-acre regional park on the northwest side of Reno, managed by Washoe County Regional Parks. It sits at about 4,560 feet against the eastern flank of Peavine Peak and looks out across the Truckee Meadows toward the Virginia Range. The Wilbur D. May Center and Arboretum anchor the park's south end; an open-meadow bowl in the middle is large enough to launch a hundred-balloon mass ascension, which is the use it is best known for nationally.
The park's calendar runs on events. The Great Reno Balloon Race holds the first full weekend after Labor Day each September and is among the largest free hot-air balloon events in the country, drawing more than a hundred and twenty thousand spectators across three mornings. Earlier in summer the Wilbur D. May Arboretum hosts plant sales; in spring and fall the May Center mounts traveling exhibits. The park is open daily at no charge, with paved paths, picnic ramadas, and a small dog park near the north entrance.
Reno sits in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, and Rancho San Rafael carries the high-desert clarity that comes with it: low humidity, a sky that goes deep blue by mid-morning, and the cold radiative dawns that make hot-air ballooning practical in September. Average September lows run near 45 degrees, lifting fast as the sun clears the Virginia Range. The meadow holds light evenly because nothing taller than a cottonwood interrupts the bowl.
