Chiricahua NM Heart of Rocks
— the stones the caldera left in conversation.
Not only on a wall.
“A loop trail through a forest of rhyolite hoodoos in southeast Arizona, named for the way the towers seem to lean toward one another. Pinnacle Balanced Rock holds in place on a contact roughly the width of a dinner plate. Twenty-seven million years ago a caldera six miles wide put the tuff down in a single afternoon.
Chiricahua NM Heart of Rocks, 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.
Chiricahua National Monument lies in Cochise County, southeast Arizona, in the Chiricahua Mountains roughly thirty-six miles southeast of Willcox. The Heart of Rocks Loop is reached by an eight-mile round-trip from the Echo Canyon trailhead at about 6,800 feet, climbing through pinnacles to a 7,300-foot crest. The monument was established in 1924 and protects roughly twelve thousand acres of eroded Rhyolite Canyon Tuff. The Chiricahua Apache called the range Tsé Tsiijí, meaning standing-up rocks, and held the land into the 1880s.
The hoodoos are weathered Rhyolite Canyon Tuff, laid down by the Turkey Creek caldera around twenty-seven million years ago in a pyroclastic eruption that emptied a magma chamber roughly six miles across. The tuff cooled into welded layers that fracture along vertical joints; rain and ice have widened those joints into the columns and balanced rocks the loop is named for. Pinnacle Balanced Rock has been estimated at about a thousand tons and rests on a contact only a few feet wide. The rock is friable; chipping accelerates loss.
The Heart of Rocks Loop runs through one of the quieter corners of the National Park system, with Chiricahua receiving roughly sixty thousand visitors a year, fewer than many trailheads draw in a week. The forest mixes Apache pine, alligator juniper, and silverleaf oak with the rhyolite columns. Mexican jays and acorn woodpeckers carry. The loop has no service, no railings at the named formations, and several spurs where a few minutes off the trail puts other visible hikers out of view. Carry water; there is none on the route.