Chimney Park hoodoos
— soft clay columns the wind is slowly taking back.
Not only on a wall.
Chimney Park hoodoos, 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.
“Slender hoodoos rise out of the Little Missouri Badlands, capped with harder sandstone that has held off the rain long enough for the softer clay underneath to stand as columns. Each spire is a record of how long the cap has lasted. The shapes change year over year as wind and weather work through the draws, and no two visits to the same draw look quite the same.
The place, in three passes.
Hoodoos form across the western North Dakota badlands wherever a hard caprock sits over softer Bullion Creek or Sentinel Butte Formation clays and siltstones. The Little Missouri River and its tributaries have cut steadily into these layers for roughly a million years, exposing pale sandstone bands and the dark lignite seams between them. The hoodoos themselves are temporary, in geologic terms: each column stands until its cap is undermined or breaks, after which the soft column underneath erodes in a season or two.
The cap is typically a fine sandstone or a calcareous concretion; the column beneath is the much softer mudstone and silt that makes up most of the badlands. Rain shapes the columns more than wind does in this country: water runs off the cap and grooves the sides, narrowing the neck of the spire until it eventually gives. The same erosion pattern produces the larger formations across Theodore Roosevelt National Park to the north and the painted draws of Slope County to the south.
Access to badlands hoodoo draws is on Forest Service gravel roads through the Little Missouri National Grassland and on park roads through Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Most viewpoints are short off-trail walks from a pullout, on ground that turns to a slick gumbo when wet, so dry conditions are essential. The Dakota Prairie Grasslands office in Bismarck or the park visitor centres at Medora and the North Unit can point visitors to the current best draws and warn off any closed for cattle or weather.
