Clarks Fork Canyon
— a river that cut itself a thousand feet down.
Not only on a wall.
Clarks Fork Canyon, 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 Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone carves a narrow granite canyon along the eastern edge of the Beartooth Plateau, the deepest cut in Wyoming and the only river in the state with a Wild and Scenic designation. The Chief Joseph Scenic Byway climbs the rim, named for the Nez Perce leader who brought his band through this corridor in 1877. Below the rim, the canyon goes quiet. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Clarks Fork Canyon is the gorge cut by the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River through the eastern edge of the Beartooth Plateau, in Park County in northwest Wyoming. The canyon runs through the Shoshone National Forest, north of Cody. A twenty-mile stretch was designated in 1990 as the only Wild and Scenic River in Wyoming. The Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, Wyoming Highway 296, climbs the rim above the canyon.
The canyon walls are Precambrian granite and gneiss, some of the oldest exposed rock in North America. The river has cut more than a thousand feet down through the plateau in a narrow slot that opens only at the canyon mouth near Clark, Wyoming. The Beartooth uplift exposed the basement rock; the river did the rest, slowly, over the last few million years. There are stretches where the canyon is only fifty feet across.
In 1877, the Nez Perce band led by Chief Joseph passed through this canyon while fleeing the U.S. Army on their long retreat toward Canada, threading horses and families along the rim where the highway now runs. The byway, completed and named in 1995, traces that route. The canyon stays largely as it was: no road descends to the river along most of its length, and the lower reaches are reached only by foot or pack stock.
