Badlands prairie dog town
— a thousand small heads above the grass, watching the same hawk.
Not only on a wall.
Badlands prairie dog town, 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.
“Roberts Prairie Dog Town sits at the edge of Sage Creek Rim Road, a wide shallow bowl in the mixed-grass prairie where black-tailed prairie dogs have held the ground for generations. The colony covers hundreds of acres. The wind is almost always moving. People pull off on the dirt shoulder, kill the engine, and listen — short barks, the occasional bison snort drifting in from the wilderness beyond. Best at the long-shadow hours, when the burrows throw their own small ridges across the grass. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Roberts Prairie Dog Town sits on Sage Creek Rim Road, about five miles west of the Pinnacles Entrance in the northwest corner of Badlands National Park. The colony is one of the largest black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) towns in the National Park system and forms the gateway to the 64,144-acre Badlands Wilderness Area. The road is unpaved but maintained for passenger cars in dry weather. The town is named for Paul A. Roberts, a former park superintendent, and lies within the mixed-grass prairie ecotype that once covered most of the northern Great Plains.
The prairie around the town reads as silent until the ear adjusts. Then the colony's vocabulary opens up: short alarm barks, jump-yips, the long territorial trill the National Park Service calls a chee-chee call. Researchers led by Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University have documented dozens of distinct calls that encode predator type, size, and direction. Above all of that, in fall and winter, you hear the bison herd that ranges through the Sage Creek basin — the largest in the park, roughly 1,200 animals. Vehicles are the only loud noise the town meets, and Sage Creek Rim Road is mostly empty after sunset.
The pullout is unmarked beyond a small park sign and lies roughly five miles west of the paved Badlands Loop Road junction at Pinnacles Overlook. There is no fee at the pullout itself; the park entrance fee is currently 30 dollars per vehicle for seven days. Visitors are required by federal regulation to stay at least 25 yards from prairie dogs and 100 yards from bison, which graze through the town. Feeding the prairie dogs is prohibited and dangerous — the colony has had documented plague die-offs and human contact carries real disease risk.
