High Knob Recreation Area
— the tower the clouds come up to meet.
Not only on a wall.
High Knob Recreation Area, 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 four-acre lake at the foot of the High Knob lookout tower, tucked into the Stone Mountain range above Norton. The stone-and-timber tower at 4,223 feet sees five states on a clear morning. The water sits cold most of the year. Coal country, recovering forest, a quiet that arrives early. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
High Knob Recreation Area sits in the Clinch Ranger District of the Jefferson National Forest, in Wise County, Virginia, four miles south of Norton. The summit reaches 4,223 feet, the highest point in the Stone Mountain range. A small lake, picnic grounds, and the High Knob Tower form the core of the recreation area. The current observation tower, a stone-and-timber structure, replaced an earlier wooden tower lost to arson in 2007 and was rebuilt by the Forest Service and local partners.
At this elevation the air runs ten degrees cooler than Norton in the valley. The summit sits inside one of the wettest pockets in Virginia, with rime ice common in winter and fog moving across the ridge on still mornings. On clear days the tower view stretches into Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina. The surrounding hardwood forest, recovering from a century of coal mining and timbering, holds rhododendron, hemlock, and northern red oak.
The recreation area is reached by Forest Road 238 off Virginia Route 619, four miles south of Norton. Day-use season runs roughly mid-May through October, with a small fee at the gate and a campground of fourteen sites. The tower itself stays open year-round for hikers willing to walk the last half-mile when the road closes. No alcohol, no swimming in the lake, leashed dogs welcome. Trails connect to the wider High Knob Trail System.
