Sentinel Butte
— the prairie's last high word before sundown.
Not only on a wall.
Sentinel 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 flat-topped sandstone rise on the western edge of North Dakota, visible from twenty miles out on I-94. The butte gives the small town below its name and its sightline. Bison and pronghorn cross the draws around its base; in summer the grass on the cap turns the color of straw and holds it through fall.
The place, in three passes.
Sentinel Butte stands about 3,422 feet above sea level in Golden Valley County, North Dakota, making it one of the highest natural points in the state, behind White Butte to the south. The flat-capped rise sits a few miles south of the town that shares its name, on the western edge of the badlands and close to the Montana border. Interstate 94 runs past the foot of the formation between Beach and Medora. The cap is private ranchland; the butte is best seen from the road, from the surrounding pasture, and from the bluffs of Theodore Roosevelt National Park to the east.
The land around the butte runs to short grass, sage, and broken draws. There is no town within sight from the cap, only the long bend of Highway 16 and the silver line of the interstate. Coyotes pass through the bottoms in the morning. The closest commercial light is the truck stop at Beach, nine miles west, and even that is screened by terrain. On a still night the only sound carried on the air is the distant thrum of a westbound semi gearing down for the next grade.
The butte changes color with the calendar more than with the weather. In June the cap and the surrounding pasture run deep green with western wheatgrass and needle-and-thread; by August the grass has cured to gold and the sandstone face turns pinker against it. October brings cottonwood yellow to the draws below, and after the first heavy snow the flat top stands white above the dark badlands. The wind off the Montana plains keeps the south face mostly bare from December through March.
