Spiti Valley
— — a cold desert held between two snow ranges.
Not only on a wall.
“A high cold desert in the Indian trans-Himalaya, set behind the main range so the monsoon almost never reaches it. Villages of mud-brick houses stack against ochre cliffs at over three thousand metres; the Spiti River runs grey-silver through the floor of the valley. Above Kaza, the white walls of Key Monastery hold to a knuckle of rock against the wind, as they have since the 11th century. — from the studio
Spiti Valley, 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.
Spiti is a high desert valley in the Lahaul and Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh, in the Indian trans-Himalaya. Mean valley-floor elevation is around 3,800 metres, with passes such as Kunzum La at 4,590 metres closing under snow from late October through May. The Spiti River drains roughly 12,000 square kilometres before joining the Sutlej near Khab. The district administrative seat for the valley is Kaza, at 3,650 metres, the largest settlement and the staging point for most monastery visits.
Spiti receives less than 250 millimetres of precipitation a year, most of it as winter snow, because the main Himalayan range to the south wrings the monsoon dry before it can cross. Population density across the valley is roughly two people per square kilometre. Kibber village, at 4,270 metres, was for years described as one of the highest motorable settlements in the world; the snow leopard count in the surrounding ridges is among the densest documented in the Indian Himalaya.
Key Monastery, set on a 4,166-metre crag above the Spiti River, is the oldest and largest Gelug-tradition gompa in the valley, with origins commonly placed in the 11th century under the scholar Dromtön. The buildings have been rebuilt after fires, Mongol raids, and a major earthquake in 1975. The interiors hold Thangka paintings and old manuscripts in Tibetan script. Tabo Monastery, further down-valley, was founded in 996 CE and is sometimes called the Ajanta of the Himalaya for its wall paintings.