Mount Elbrus
— — a white dome with two heads.
Not only on a wall.
“A twin-domed volcano in the western Caucasus, taller than anything west of it on the continent. Snow covers the upper slopes through every season, and the wind off the summit plateau is the dominant feature of every photograph ever made of the mountain. Climbers reach the high huts by cable car from Azau village, then walk the last vertical kilometre on glacier and scoria.
Mount Elbrus, 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 Elbrus is a dormant stratovolcano in the western Caucasus, in the Kabardino-Balkaria republic of southern Russia. Its west summit reaches 5,642 metres and the east summit 5,621 metres, which makes it the highest peak on the European continent under the most widely used geographic boundary. The mountain last erupted approximately 1,700 years ago. Its upper slopes carry 22 named glaciers totalling roughly 134 square kilometres of permanent ice. The Baksan valley to the south is the standard climbing approach.
Above 5,000 metres the atmospheric pressure on Elbrus drops to about half of sea level, and the wind across the summit plateau routinely exceeds 100 kilometres per hour. The thin air is the principal hazard of the climb; altitude sickness turns more parties back than weather does. Most expeditions sleep two nights at the Garabashi huts near 3,900 metres to acclimatise before the summit push. The summit day itself is usually begun by headlamp at two in the morning.
The standard south-route ascent begins at the cable car in Azau village in the Baksan valley and runs in stages to the Mir station at about 3,500 metres and the Garabashi huts at 3,900 metres. From there climbers walk to Pastukhov Rocks at 4,700 metres and onward to the saddle and the west summit. The climbing season is May through September. A Russian border-zone permit is required for the area, and most foreign parties go with a licensed mountain guide.