Sandia Peak tramway summit
— the watermelon hour, written in granite.
Not only on a wall.
Sandia Peak tramway summit, 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.
“The tram lifts you out of the desert in fifteen minutes and lets you out on the crest at a little over ten thousand feet. The city spreads below to the west, the Estancia Basin to the east, and the granite the Spanish named for watermelon turns the colour it was named for in the last half hour of sun. The wind up there is older than the cable.
The place, in three passes.
The Sandia Peak Tramway runs 2.7 miles from the eastern edge of Albuquerque to the crest of the Sandia Mountains at 10,378 feet, inside the Cibola National Forest. It opened in 1966 and remains one of the longest aerial tramways in the world. The summit sits on the spine of the range the Spanish named Sandia (watermelon) for the pink alpenglow that washes the west face at sunset. From the top deck the view runs west across the Rio Grande valley and east into the Estancia Basin and the Manzano Mountains beyond.
The summit station stands more than a vertical mile above the city. Temperatures on the crest run roughly twenty to thirty degrees Fahrenheit cooler than Albuquerque below, and the wind on the deck is often steady enough to lean into. The thinner air at 10,378 feet thins the colour as well: the desert palette of the Rio Grande valley softens, the Manzanos to the south turn blue, and on clear days the view reaches more than a hundred miles. Snow can stay on the upper trails into May.
The mountain takes its name from the colour the granite turns at the end of the day. The west face is Sandia granite, roughly 1.4 billion years old, with enough potassium feldspar to glow rose and salmon when the low sun hits it. From the city the wall looks like a slab of watermelon for about twenty minutes; from the summit deck the same light runs the other way, lighting the Estancia Basin and turning the long shadow of the range eastward across the high desert floor.
