Jemez Springs Soda Dam
— the river the mountain built a wall around.
Not only on a wall.
Jemez Springs Soda Dam, 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 pale calcium dam laid down by mineral springs over thousands of years, set across the Jemez River about a mile north of Jemez Springs. The water has cut a low arch through it and slips out the other side. Cars pull off on the shoulder of NM-4; people climb the rocks a little and watch the river do its old work.
The place, in three passes.
Soda Dam sits at roughly 6,400 feet elevation in the Jemez Mountains of north-central New Mexico, about a mile north of Jemez Springs village along NM Highway 4. The dam is a travertine formation, built over an estimated 7,000 years by calcium-carbonate-rich hot springs depositing mineral skin on the bed of the Jemez River. The river now passes through a small natural arch near the dam's base. The site lies within the Santa Fe National Forest, a short drive from Battleship Rock and Jemez Falls.
The dam is travertine, a calcium carbonate left behind by warm spring water as it cools and loses dissolved gas. Each season's flow lays down another pale layer, building outward across the canyon floor. Geologists associate the system with the Valles Caldera, the collapsed volcanic basin twelve miles to the northeast that still drives the region's geothermal heat. The rock is soft enough to climb and brittle enough to break; the Jemez River has been finding new paths through it for centuries.
The Jemez River runs cold and clear out of the mountains above, then meets the warmer mineral springs that feed the dam. Just downstream a small natural arch opens where the river has cut through the travertine, low enough to watch from the highway shoulder. The water carries enough dissolved calcium to keep building the dam slowly even now. Trout hold in the pools above and below, and the red canyon walls of the lower Jemez sit close on both sides.
