Badlands National Park pinnacles
— the spires the prairie weathered down to.
Not only on a wall.
Badlands National Park pinnacles, 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.
“The pinnacles run along the Badlands Wall for miles, sharp clay spires the prairie wore down from a plateau. From Pinnacles Overlook the line of them recedes east into haze, each ridge a slightly paler grey than the last. At sunrise the colour reads ochre, gold, and rose in narrow bands. By noon it flattens to white. By evening it lifts again.
The place, in three passes.
The Badlands Wall is a long escarpment cutting through Jackson and Pennington counties in southwestern South Dakota, separating the upper mixed-grass prairie from the lower White River basin. The pinnacles are the most heavily eroded section of the wall, visible from Pinnacles Overlook at the western end of the Badlands Loop Road. Badlands was designated a national monument in 1939 and redesignated a national park by Congress in 1978. The park covers roughly 244,000 acres, of which about 64,000 are managed as the Badlands Wilderness Area.
The pinnacles are carved from layered Brule and Chadron Formation mudstones, deposited as floodplain sediment between thirty-seven and twenty-eight million years ago. Volcanic ash from the Yellowstone hotspot interlayers the clay in pale grey bands. The wall is eroding at roughly one inch per year, one of the fastest rates on the continent, which means the current skyline is geologically temporary. Fossils of oreodonts, ancient horses, and saber-toothed cats turn up in the lower beds, and the park's fossil preparation lab at Cedar Pass shows current finds.
The pinnacles take colour best in the half-hour after sunrise and the half-hour before sunset, when the low sun rakes across the ridges and the ash bands separate from the clay. Morning shows ochre and rose; evening reads gold and lavender. Midday flattens the wall to chalk white. Photographers favour the western Pinnacles Overlook for sunset and the eastern Big Badlands Overlook for sunrise. Spring storms across the prairie sometimes throw a double rainbow over the formations, the colour pulling against the dark cloud bank to the north.
