Altai Mountains
— — a sky the steppe gives back.
Not only on a wall.
“The Kazakh end of the Altai, where the steppe lifts into snow and four borders run together: Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Mongolia. Larch turns gold in September. The Bukhtarma River cuts down out of the high country toward the reservoir, and herders still move with the seasons up into the summer pastures. Lake Markakol sits at 1,485 metres, ringed by spruce, mostly empty. The air is thin enough that the colour of the sky changes when a cloud passes. from the studio
Altai Mountains, 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.
The Altai Mountains are a complex of ranges running roughly 2,000 kilometres across the converging borders of Kazakhstan, Russia, China, and Mongolia. The Kazakh portion lies in the east of the country, in East Kazakhstan Region, where the range meets the Kazakh steppe at the Bukhtarma and Irtysh river systems. The highest summit of the range, Belukha, rises to 4,506 metres on the Kazakhstan-Russia border. The Russian portion of the range was inscribed by UNESCO as the Golden Mountains of Altai World Heritage Site in 1998.
Katon-Karagay National Park, established by Kazakhstan in 2001, protects about 6,400 square kilometres of the Kazakh Altai and is the largest national park in the country. Inside the park, Lake Markakol sits at 1,485 metres elevation in a basin ringed by Siberian spruce and larch. Snow leopards, argali sheep, and Altai maral deer move through the high valleys, and the human density across the wider region remains under two people per square kilometre. The dominant sound through much of the year is wind across grass and water.
The Kazakh Altai climate is sharply continental. January in the valleys averages near minus 20 Celsius, with much colder readings on the high passes; July averages around 16 to 18 Celsius. Snow cover holds from October into May. Larch forests turn gold across the slopes through the second half of September, the customary travel season. Seasonal herders, descendants of the Kazakh nomadic tradition, still move livestock between winter villages and summer pastures called jailau, a transhumance that gives the season its rhythm.