Crack-in-Rock pueblo
— — a doorway the desert kept for eight hundred years.
Not only on a wall.
“An ancestral Puebloan ruin set on a basalt outcrop in the backcountry of Wupatki National Monument. The walls are coursed Moenkopi sandstone, the colour of an old penny in late light. Reached only on a ranger-led overnight hike offered a few weekends each spring and fall. Petroglyphs ring the rock. The site sits above the painted desert and looks out toward the San Francisco Peaks. People lived here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, then left. The wind here carries a long time. from the studio
Crack-in-Rock pueblo, 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.
Crack-in-Rock Pueblo lies in the remote northern backcountry of Wupatki National Monument, north of Flagstaff in Coconino County, Arizona. Built and occupied roughly between 1100 and 1250 CE by ancestral Puebloan peoples, the masonry sits on a basalt outcrop above the Little Colorado River valley. The National Park Service protects the site as a closed area; the only public access is a ranger-led overnight backpacking trip offered a few times each spring and fall, with permits awarded by lottery.
The pueblo's walls are coursed Moenkopi Sandstone, a Triassic red bed that splits cleanly into building slabs and weathers to the warm rust colour visible across Wupatki's other sites — Wukoki, the Citadel, Wupatki Pueblo itself. Builders chinked the joints with smaller stones and a clay mortar quarried from local washes. The site is named for a deep vertical fissure running through the basalt host rock; structures sit on either side, and petroglyphs are pecked into the surrounding boulders.
Wupatki is one of the quietest units in the National Park System. The Crack-in-Rock backcountry is closed to day visitors year-round, and the guided hike — about fourteen miles round trip with one night on the ground — sees roughly a hundred people per season. Hopi, Zuni, and Navajo communities recognise the place as ancestral, and the Park Service asks visitors to leave petroglyphs and sherds where they lie. The San Francisco Peaks stand on the southern horizon, sacred to the Hopi as Nuvatukya'ovi.