Mount Roraima
— — the table the clouds set themselves on.
Not only on a wall.
“A flat-topped sandstone mountain rising out of the savannah in the Pacaraima range, its summit lost in cloud most afternoons. The name is Pemon: roro for blue-green, ma for great. Conan Doyle put dinosaurs on it; the real summit is colder and stranger than that, a pavement of black rock and pink quartz pools, with endemic frogs that exist nowhere else. The standard route up climbs from the Venezuelan side. The Brazilian face is a sheer wall, watched from the village of Paraitepui do Norte. — from the studio
Mount Roraima, 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.
Mount Roraima is the highest of the Pacaraima tepuis, a chain of flat-topped sandstone mountains shared by Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana. Its summit plateau sits at roughly 2,810 metres and covers about 31 square kilometres, with the triple border of the three countries meeting at a marker on top. The Brazilian portion is protected within Monte Roraima National Park, established in 1989 and managed by ICMBio. The rock is Precambrian quartz-arenite sandstone, deposited around two billion years ago, which makes Roraima geologically older than almost any mountain on Earth.
The summit weather is wet and cold by tropical standards. Cloud sits on the plateau most days, lifting briefly at dawn before re-forming by mid-morning. Annual rainfall on top runs well above three metres in places, feeding waterfalls that fall the full kilometre to the savannah below — among them the headwaters that drain to the Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Essequibo. The temperature on the plateau ranges from near freezing at night to about ten degrees Celsius in sun. The wind comes off the Gran Sabana to the west with little to slow it.
There is no trail up the Brazilian face; the cliff is vertical for most of its 1,000-metre rise. The standard ascent leaves from Paraitepui in Venezuela, a six-day trek arranged through Pemon guides out of Santa Elena de Uairén. The Brazilian side is best seen from the village of Paraitepui do Norte in Roraima state, reached on dirt roads from Boa Vista. Park entry requires authorisation from ICMBio and an Indigenous-community escort, since the land is shared with the Ingarikó people. Dry season runs December to April.