Pedernales Falls layered limestone
— a river the limestone refuses to let run straight.
Not only on a wall.
Pedernales Falls layered limestone, 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 Pedernales drops over tilted slabs of three-hundred-million-year-old limestone in a stair-step run about a quarter mile long. The rock is the Marble Falls formation, lifted and tipped during the Ouachita Orogeny long before the Hill Country had a name. Water finds the seams and works them. After a hard rain the river can rise twenty feet in an hour, and the falls go from a clear braid to a roar the canyon walls hold for days.
The place, in three passes.
Pedernales Falls State Park covers about 5,200 acres along nine miles of the Pedernales River in Blanco County, in the eastern Texas Hill Country. The park sits roughly 32 miles west of Austin, reached via US 290 and Ranch Road 3232. Texas Parks and Wildlife opened the park in 1971 on land deeded from the Circle Bar Ranch. The river falls about fifty feet across the staircase reach for which the park is named, then runs slow through cypress pools downstream.
The exposed rock is the Marble Falls Limestone, a Pennsylvanian-age unit roughly 300 million years old, made of layered marine carbonates lifted and tilted during the Ouachita Orogeny. The strike at the falls runs about fifteen degrees from horizontal, which is what produces the river's staircase look. Above and below the falls, younger Cretaceous limestone caps the bluffs. The white-to-grey-blue colour of the streambed comes from weathered carbonate skinned by river silt.
The Pedernales drains a roughly 1,300-square-mile basin in the Edwards Plateau and is prone to flash floods: in June 1935 a wall of water reached an estimated 40 feet in the Johnson City reach, and the river still rises sharply in storms. The park closes the falls area when the gauge climbs, and signs warn visitors not to enter the river bed when rain is forecast upstream. Cypress and pecan line the banks below the falls.
