Pathfinder Reservoir
— a granite canyon plugged in 1909, holding the river back.
Not only on a wall.
Pathfinder Reservoir, 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 long blue reservoir held in a narrow granite canyon on the North Platte, about 47 miles southwest of Casper. The dam at the foot — a hand-laid masonry arch, finished in 1909 — was the Bureau of Reclamation's first project in Wyoming and one of the first in the country. The country around it is sage and rimrock, antelope and rattlesnake, almost no shade. The water is the colour of the sky; the canyon walls are warm pink granite. Fremont came through here in 1842 and gave the place its name. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Pathfinder Reservoir sits on the North Platte River in central Wyoming, straddling the line between Natrona and Carbon Counties about 47 miles southwest of Casper. The lake is held back by Pathfinder Dam, a 214-foot masonry arch finished in 1909 as one of the first projects of the new U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The reservoir backs up roughly 22 miles into a narrow granite canyon, with a capacity around 1.07 million acre-feet. The land around it is high sage prairie at about 5,900 feet, ringed by the Seminoe Mountains to the south.
Pathfinder Dam is hand-laid coursed masonry of locally quarried Precambrian granite, the same warm pink stone that forms the canyon walls. The blocks were cut by hand on site between 1905 and 1909 and lifted into a thin arch 214 feet high and only 11 feet thick at the crest. It was a Reclamation Service showpiece — proof that the arid West could be irrigated — and remains in service more than a century later, supplying water to roughly 226,000 acres of farmland downstream in Wyoming and Nebraska.
The reservoir is managed as the Pathfinder National Wildlife Refuge and Pathfinder State Recreation Area, with access from WY-220 and a graded county road to the dam. A small interpretive center sits in the former 1898 dam-tenders' stone cabin near the dam crest, open seasonally May through September. The area is day-use and dispersed-camping; there are no services on site and limited cell coverage. Summer afternoons run hot and exposed, and lightning is common — most visitors come in early morning or evening.
