Bullion Butte
— a flat-topped horizon the prairie keeps coming back to.
Not only on a wall.
Bullion Butte, 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 high flat-topped butte rising above the Little Missouri National Grassland in Billings County, southwest North Dakota. Roughly 3,300 feet at the rim, about 800 feet above the badlands around it. The cap is scoria, baked red where lignite seams once burned underground. No road climbs it. Hunters, ranchers, and the occasional backpacker know the routes up. The butte holds the eye for forty miles in any direction.
The place, in three passes.
Bullion Butte is a prominent mesa-form butte in the Little Missouri National Grassland of southwestern North Dakota, in Billings County roughly thirty miles south of Medora. Its summit reaches about 3,316 feet, putting it roughly 800 feet above the surrounding badland floor and making it one of the most visible landmarks in the western part of the state. The cap is resistant scoria, a baked red clay-rock formed when underlying lignite coal seams ignited and burned in place. The butte sits west of the Little Missouri River, between Medora to the north and Marmarth near the Montana line.
This is empty country. No paved road reaches the butte. Access is by ranch two-track and a long walk, much of it across a checkerboard of federal grassland and private ranchland. The grass carries pronghorn, mule deer, sharp-tailed grouse, and prairie rattlesnake. Wind is the constant. From the rim, the view opens to Theodore Roosevelt National Park's South Unit on the northern horizon and into eastern Montana to the west. There is no signage, no marker, no register box at the top. Most days you will see no one.
The butte sits on a mix of US Forest Service grassland and private ranch land. Check with the Medora Ranger District of the Dakota Prairie Grasslands for current access routes and any seasonal closures, and respect posted private boundaries. There are no facilities, no marked trail, no water on the climb. Best windows are late May and early June, or mid-September through October. Summer brings ticks, heat, and afternoon thunderstorms; winter strips the rim bare and the two-tracks drift in. Carry water, navigation, and weather layers regardless of season.
