Buffalo Gap National Grassland
— mixed-grass country, all the way to the curve.
Not only on a wall.
Buffalo Gap National Grassland, 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.
“Buffalo Gap National Grassland is the open ground between two of the country's stranger landscapes — the pine-dark Black Hills to the west and the eroded spires of the Badlands to the east. Five hundred and ninety-one thousand acres of mixed-grass prairie, mostly leased to ranchers, threaded by gravel section roads that go further than the maps suggest. Western wheatgrass and little bluestem in summer, blowing snow in winter. The wind almost never lets up. Pronghorn and burrowing owls work the same flats. The grassland is the country before it gets photographed. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Buffalo Gap National Grassland covers about 591,000 acres of mixed-grass prairie in southwestern South Dakota, administered by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Nebraska National Forest unit. The grassland was assembled from sub-marginal farmland in the late 1930s under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, after the Dust Bowl emptied much of the homestead-era ground. It wraps Badlands National Park on the north, south, and west, and meets the southern flank of the Black Hills National Forest near Hot Springs. Most of the grazing is permitted to local ranching cooperatives.
The grassland reads as four different places across the year. Late May into June is the green window, when wheatgrass and needle-and-thread are tallest and prairie wildflowers — purple coneflower, prairie clover, gumweed — show through. July and August dry the country to straw and the temperature can sit above 95°F. September turns the bluestem rust-red. Winter is open snow and stripped bunchgrass, with wind chills well below zero. Pronghorn hold through the cold; most birdlife migrates south by November.
Access is free and largely undeveloped. The Forest Service maintains two interpretive sites — the Fairburn Agate Beds south of Fairburn and the National Grasslands Visitor Center in Wall — and a network of unsigned gravel section roads. The Conata Basin Overlook on the south rim of Badlands National Park looks across about thirty miles of grassland to the horizon. Camping is dispersed and free outside fenced grazing allotments; water must be carried in. Cell service is intermittent and the nearest fuel is in Wall, Interior, Hot Springs, or Rapid City.
