Angel Peak Scenic Area
— badlands the wind keeps rewriting.
Not only on a wall.
Angel Peak Scenic Area, 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 shelf of sandstone above the San Juan Basin badlands, halfway between Bloomfield and Cuba on US 550. The peak itself is the small spire the road is named for, but the country around it is the real thing — Kutz Canyon falling away below in pale grey and rose, the cliffs cut into hoodoos by a wind that hardly stops. The Bureau of Land Management keeps a small primitive campground on the rim and asks nothing for it. Few people stop. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Angel Peak Scenic Area is a Bureau of Land Management site in San Juan County, New Mexico, about 15 miles south of Bloomfield off US 550. The peak rises to roughly 6,991 feet above sea level and overlooks the Kutz Canyon badlands at the northern end of the San Juan Basin. The site is part of the BLM Farmington Field Office and sits within country where Ancestral Puebloan trade routes once ran between Chaco Canyon and the Animas and San Juan rivers. The area is undeveloped beyond a short access road, three picnic shelters, and a nine-site primitive campground on the rim.
The cliffs are layered sandstone and shale from the Nacimiento and Ojo Alamo formations, deposited in the early Paleocene as river and floodplain sediments around 65 million years ago. Erosion has carved the rim into hoodoos and capped pillars, with Kutz Canyon falling roughly 1,000 feet below the overlook. The colour band runs from a pale buff at the rim through grey and rose toward the canyon floor, with darker bands of carbonaceous shale marking the older horizons. The whole basin is one of the richest Paleocene mammal fossil beds in North America.
The site is unstaffed and there is no entrance fee. The campground is first-come, first-served, with vault toilets, picnic shelters, and no water or hookups. The wind off the basin runs hard most afternoons, and overnight temperatures swing thirty degrees Fahrenheit between summer days and nights. The nearest services are in Bloomfield, 15 miles north on US 550, with fuel and groceries. Cell coverage along the rim is intermittent. Visitors are expected to pack out everything they bring in.
