Lena River
— — the long river the cold keeps clean.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the three great Siberian rivers, running north out of the Baikal mountains for roughly four thousand four hundred kilometres before fanning out into a delta on the Arctic coast. The Lena carries no major dams along its length, which gives it a clear, quick character most large rivers have lost. South of Yakutsk it cuts past the Lena Pillars, a wall of vertical limestone towers a hundred and fifty kilometres long. In winter the river freezes thick enough to drive on. In June the ice breaks and the water turns the colour of a slate roof in rain.
Lena River, 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 Lena is the easternmost of the three great Siberian rivers, rising in the Baikal Range about ten kilometres west of Lake Baikal and running north for roughly 4,294 kilometres to the Laptev Sea. Its drainage basin covers about 2.49 million square kilometres, nearly all of it within the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Unlike the Ob and the Yenisei to the west, the Lena flows freely along its entire length, with no major dams. The largest city on its banks is Yakutsk, capital of Sakha, founded as a Cossack outpost in 1632.
Roughly 180 kilometres upriver from Yakutsk the Lena passes the Lena Pillars (Lensky Stolby), a continuous wall of Cambrian limestone towers rising up to 220 metres above the water and running for about 150 kilometres along the right bank. The formation was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012, both for its geology and for its early Cambrian fossil record. The pillars sit within the Lena Pillars Nature Park, designated by the Sakha Republic in 1995. Most visitors reach them by river, on summer cruises from Yakutsk that run two to four days.
The river's year has two acts. From October through May it freezes hard; at Yakutsk the ice grows past a metre thick and the river becomes a working winter road, with trucks driving the surface and a seasonal ice crossing carrying the federal highway. The break-up around the second week of May is the loudest single event of the Yakutian year. The summer navigable season runs roughly from June into early October, when the river is the main supply route to remote settlements along its lower course. Winter temperatures along the middle Lena routinely fall past minus 40°C.