Roman Nose State Park canyon
— a green canyon the spring keeps cold.
Not only on a wall.
Roman Nose State Park canyon, 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 small canyon of gypsum bluffs cut by Bear Creek above the prairie north of Watonga. Big Spring runs cold all year from the rock and feeds two narrow lakes the CCC dammed in the 1930s. The land was carved from the allotment of Cheyenne Chief Henry Roman Nose, whose name the park took in 1937. The cottonwoods stay green when the prairie around it has turned brown.
The place, in three passes.
Roman Nose State Park sits in Blaine County, west-central Oklahoma, about seven miles north of Watonga off State Highway 8A. The park is built around a gypsum-walled canyon cut by Bear Creek into the Permian Blaine Formation. It is one of the seven original Oklahoma state parks dedicated in 1937 and is named for Cheyenne Chief Henry Roman Nose, whose Dawes Act allotment included Big Spring at the canyon's head. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the lodge, cabins, and stone bridges between 1935 and 1937.
The canyon walls are gypsum and dolomite of the Permian Blaine Formation, deposited roughly 270 million years ago in the evaporating margins of a shallow inland sea. The same unit forms the gypsum cliffs of the Glass Mountains to the north and supplies much of the wallboard gypsum mined in western Oklahoma. Big Spring rises from the formation at the canyon's head, flowing cold and steady year-round, and is the reason the canyon stays green into August when the open prairie has gone brown.
The park is open daily year-round; the historic CCC-built lodge and adjacent cabins are reservable through Oklahoma State Parks. The two lakes — Boecher and Watonga — carry trout in winter and bass through summer. The 18-hole Roman Nose golf course was added in 1956 on the prairie above the canyon. The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes hold annual cultural events at the park; the council fire at Big Spring remains the spiritual centre of the site.
