Wheeler Peak summit cirque
— the bowl the glacier left behind.
Not only on a wall.
Wheeler Peak summit 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 glacial bowl cut from quartzite below the 13,065-foot summit, the second-highest in Nevada. The cirque holds the state's only rock glacier, broken stone moving slow over buried ice. Below the rim, bristlecone pines older than the pyramids stand in twisted ranks. The wind here doesn't quiet. It just changes direction.
The place, in three passes.
Wheeler Peak rises to 13,065 feet inside Great Basin National Park, the highest point of the Snake Range and the second-highest summit in Nevada after Boundary Peak. The cirque on the northeast face cradles a rock glacier, a tongue of broken quartzite over a hidden ice core, and the only glacial feature of its kind in the state. The standard route climbs from the Summit Trailhead at 10,160 feet through bristlecone pine groves on the lateral moraine. The park was established in 1986; the peak's name honours George M. Wheeler of the 1869 survey.
Above 10,000 feet the air thins fast. The Snake Range sits in deep rain shadow east of the Sierra Nevada, which leaves the sky clear, the humidity low, and the night dark enough that Great Basin holds International Dark Sky Park status. The cirque collects cold-pool air below the summit ridge through the night, and storms build over the basin most summer afternoons by two. Bristlecone pines on the moraine, including the grove on Wheeler's flank, are among the oldest non-clonal organisms on earth.
The Summit Trail covers about 8.6 miles round trip with roughly 3,000 feet of gain, leaving from the Wheeler Peak Campground at 10,160 feet. The trailhead road usually opens in late June and closes with the first heavy snow in October. Lehman Caves Visitor Center sits more than 5,000 feet below, near the park entrance off US-50. The nearest town is Baker, Nevada, population around 65. There is no entrance fee for Great Basin, one of the few national parks without one.
