Cimarron National Grassland horizon
— the horizon the wind keeps polishing.
Not only on a wall.
Cimarron National Grassland horizon, 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.
“Shortgrass and chalk-coloured sky, the kind of flat that isn't really flat once you walk it. The federal grassland sits just over the Kansas line in Morton County, and the Cimarron River carries the same horizon down into the Oklahoma Panhandle. Wagons on the Santa Fe Trail's Cimarron Cutoff crossed here. Pronghorn still do.
The place, in three passes.
Cimarron National Grassland is a 108,175-acre tract of federally protected shortgrass prairie in Morton County, Kansas, immediately north of the Oklahoma Panhandle. The U.S. Forest Service has managed it under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act since 1954, recovering land scoured during the 1930s Dust Bowl. The Cimarron River, the boundary that gives the grassland its name, flows southeast across the line into Oklahoma's Cimarron County, carrying the same plains horizon down toward Black Mesa country. It is the largest single piece of public land in Kansas, and the panhandle picks up where it ends.
Elevation runs from roughly 3,300 to 3,540 feet along the Cimarron breaks, high enough that the light reads dry and the horizon stays unbroken for fifteen or twenty miles in any direction. Summers cross 100°F; winters bottom out below zero. Wind is the constant fact. The Point of Rocks bluff above the old Santa Fe Trail's Cimarron Cutoff still gives the longest sightline in the region. On a clear morning, Oklahoma's Black Mesa rises out of the next state to the southwest, and the air carries no edge of city.
The grassland holds the largest lesser prairie-chicken lek complex on Forest Service land. At dawn in March and April, males boom and stamp on traditional grounds, a sound carried unobstructed by the prairie. Pronghorn cross between Kansas and Oklahoma in the same loose herds they used a century ago. The Cimarron Recreation Area campground and the riverside cottonwoods near Middle Spring are the only places anything taller than a yucca stands. Otherwise the land just keeps going, and the wind is what fills the room.
