Kodiak Island
— the island the bears kept.
Not only on a wall.
“The second-largest island in the United States, set in the Gulf of Alaska where the Pacific reaches up to the mainland. Spruce forest, salmon rivers, and one of the densest populations of brown bear on earth. The town of Kodiak sits at the northeast tip, half a Russian colonial port, half a working fishing town that has not stopped moving since 1792.
Kodiak Island, 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.
Kodiak Island anchors the Kodiak Archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska, roughly four hundred kilometres south of Anchorage and separated from the Alaska Peninsula by the Shelikof Strait. At about 9,300 square kilometres it is the second-largest island in the United States, after the Big Island of Hawaii. The town of Kodiak, founded by Russian fur traders in 1792 at the harbour the natives called Sun'aq, sits at the northeast tip. Two-thirds of the land lies inside the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1941 to protect the brown bear population.
The Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge covers roughly 1.9 million acres and supports an estimated 3,500 Kodiak brown bears, one of the largest subspecies of brown bear in the world. Adult males commonly weigh four hundred to six hundred kilograms. The refuge holds no roads inside its boundary; access is by float plane from the town of Kodiak or by boat into bays like Uyak and Karluk. Bear viewing concentrates along the salmon streams from July through September, when the runs draw the bears down to the gravel.
The Port of Kodiak consistently ranks among the top five US commercial fishing ports by value of landings, working salmon, halibut, pollock, cod, and king crab out of canneries on the town waterfront. Five species of Pacific salmon spawn in the island's rivers — Karluk, Ayakulik, Olds, Dog Salmon — feeding both the fleet and the bears in the interior. The fishery has been continuously worked since the Russian-American Company established its first settlement at Three Saints Bay in 1784, three years before moving operations north to the current town site.