Wood Buffalo National Park
— — a forest so wide the sky changes inside it.
Not only on a wall.
“Canada's largest national park: 44,807 square kilometres of boreal plain, salt flats, and the braided Peace-Athabasca Delta. The last free-roaming herd of wood bison, about 3,000 strong, lives inside its borders, and the only natural nesting ground of the whooping crane sits in the marshes near Sass River. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1983, and a Dark Sky Preserve large enough that the aurora reads green even from the truck.
Wood Buffalo 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.
Established in 1922 to protect the last herd of wood bison, Wood Buffalo straddles the Alberta and Northwest Territories border at about 60° north. The park covers 44,807 square kilometres, larger than Switzerland, and contains the Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the world's largest freshwater inland deltas, at its northern edge. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site in 1983 for its ecological values. The administrative town is Fort Smith on the Slave River, where Parks Canada's interpretive centre and the access road to Pine Lake both begin.
There are no paved roads inside the park. Pine Lake Road runs about 60 kilometres south from Fort Smith to the only developed campground; everything west of that is bush plane or canoe access. The Peace and Athabasca rivers meet in a delta so flat that the wind across it carries for kilometres. In 2013 the park was designated the largest Dark Sky Preserve in the world, about 44,800 square kilometres of unbroken night, large enough that aurora and the Milky Way are visible from any clearing on a clear evening.
Fort Smith is the access point, reached by Highway 5 from Hay River year-round or by scheduled flight from Edmonton and Yellowknife. Salt Plains overlook and Karstland sinkhole pull-offs are reachable by car in summer; Pine Lake campground takes RVs and tents from June through September. Whooping crane nesting grounds in the Sass and Klewi watersheds are closed to all visitors to protect the roughly 500 remaining birds. Winters drop below minus 40, and aurora viewing peaks from November through March.