Vedauwoo climbing crags
— granite that bites back.
Not only on a wall.
Vedauwoo climbing crags, 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.
“Pink Sherman granite rises in piled towers above the high prairie between Cheyenne and Laramie. Climbers come for the offwidths, the wide grainy cracks that take a knee and a shoulder rather than a hand. The rock eats skin. The reward is a route on coarse 1.4-billion-year-old granite with antelope grazing the meadow below.
The place, in three passes.
Vedauwoo (pronounced VEE-da-voo) is a climbing and scrambling area in the Sherman Mountains of southeastern Wyoming, in the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest. It lies a few miles north of Interstate 80, roughly halfway between Cheyenne and Laramie, at about 8,100 feet elevation. The exit at Vedauwoo Road serves the recreation area, campground, and the trailheads for Turtle Rock, Walt's Wall, and the Nautilus. The name comes from an Arapaho word commonly glossed as 'earth-born spirit.'
The crags are weathered Sherman Granite, a coarse pink-and-grey rock crystallised roughly 1.4 billion years ago and exhumed by long erosion of the overlying sediments. The grain is famously rough, with feldspar crystals up to several centimetres across, which gives Vedauwoo both its bite and its grip. The same pluton runs east into the Laramie Range. Climbers know the rock as the home of American offwidth: cracks wider than a fist, narrower than a body, that require knee-locks, chicken-wings, and full-body torque.
Vedauwoo is open year-round; the main season runs May through October, with summer afternoons warm and frequent thunderstorms after 2 p.m. A day-use fee applies at the developed sites; dispersed parking is free along the forest roads. The Turtle Rock loop is a roughly 3-mile walk that circles the central formation past the most famous cracks. Camping at Vedauwoo Campground is first-come, first-served. The nearest fuel and food are in Laramie, about 20 miles west on I-80.
