Watarrka National Park
— — the canyon the desert keeps for itself.
Not only on a wall.
“Watarrka National Park sits in the George Gill Range in the southern Northern Territory, roughly halfway between Alice Springs and Uluru. Its centre is Kings Canyon, where sandstone walls drop more than a hundred metres straight into the riverbed. The Rim Walk loops around the top in three to four hours; the Garden of Eden waterhole holds a slow green pool in a fissure of red rock. The park is the traditional country of the Luritja people.
Watarrka National Park, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Watarrka National Park covers about 1,073 square kilometres of the George Gill Range in the southern Northern Territory of Australia. Its best-known feature is Kings Canyon, where the southern wall of the range drops more than 100 metres into a sandstone gorge. The park lies roughly 320 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs and 300 kilometres north-east of Uluru, reached on the Mereenie Loop and Luritja Road. It is the traditional country of the Luritja people, who have held the area as Watarrka for thousands of years and co-manage the park with the Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Commission.
The sandstone here is Mereenie sandstone, laid down hundreds of millions of years ago and pushed up with the rest of the George Gill Range during the Alice Springs orogeny. The Rim Walk crosses what locals call the Lost City, a field of weathered domes the wind has rounded into beehives over very long time. Cross-bedded layers in the cliff faces record the direction of ancient riverbeds. The colour shifts from pale apricot in morning light to a deep red after rain, then to violet against the eastern sky at last light.
The park sits on the edge of one of the most remote populated regions on the continent. Mobile coverage drops out before the canyon road; the nearest small settlement, Kings Creek Station, is about 36 kilometres away, and the nearest town with a hospital is Alice Springs. The Rim Walk closes by 9 a.m. in the warmer months because heatstroke risk above 36 degrees Celsius is real. Walkers carry water, not earbuds. The wind through the gorge in the late afternoon is most of what you hear.