Bottomless Lakes State Park
— water that goes a long way down.
Not only on a wall.
Bottomless Lakes State 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 string of nine small lakes set into the bluffs above the Pecos, an hour east of the New Mexico desert you'd expect. The water reads dark green where it deepens — not because the lakes are bottomless, but because they are sinkholes opened in the gypsum, and the depth carries the colour. Lea Lake, the largest, has a swimming beach and a campground. The others sit quiet in their basins, ringed by red rock and tamarisk, with the Pecos a low line behind them. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Bottomless Lakes State Park lies in Chaves County, New Mexico, about twelve miles east of Roswell along the Pecos River. The park protects a chain of nine sinkhole lakes formed when groundwater dissolved underlying gypsum and salt, collapsing the surface into deep cenotes. It opened in 1933 as the first state park in New Mexico, managed today by the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department. The lakes are not actually bottomless — the deepest, Lea Lake, reaches about ninety feet — but early cowboys who tried to sound them with weighted ropes could not find the floor.
The colour of the lakes is a function of depth and dissolved minerals. The basins are recharged by groundwater moving through the gypsum karst beneath the Pecos floodplain, and the high mineral content keeps the water unusually clear. Lea Lake, the deepest at roughly ninety feet, holds the most saturated green; smaller lakes like Cottonwood and Mirror sit shallower and lean toward turquoise in summer light. The park's lakes share their geological lineage with the much larger cenotes of the Yucatán, formed by the same dissolution process in different rock.
The park entrance is off Highway 409, reached by driving east from Roswell on US 380 and turning south. A day-use fee is collected at the gate; an annual New Mexico State Parks pass covers entry. Lea Lake has a swimming beach, a bathhouse, and a campground with hookup sites and primitive tent loops. The other lakes are reached by short walks from pullouts along the park road. Summer afternoons get hot — over 95°F is common in July — and a morning visit is more comfortable.
