Lake Mead from Hoover Dam
— the desert's held water, blue against red stone.
Not only on a wall.
“The Colorado, stopped. Where the river slowed in 1936 and became the largest reservoir the country had ever built, sitting in a basin of pale sandstone with the dam at its western lip. The water has dropped year on year, leaving a bathtub ring on the canyon walls that you can read like a calendar. The blue, against that rock, is still the colour the desert is trying to keep.
Lake Mead from Hoover Dam, 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.
Lake Mead is the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, straddling the Arizona–Nevada border about 30 miles east of Las Vegas. When the dam was completed in 1936, it created what was then the largest reservoir in the United States, a body of water held inside Black Canyon. The lake and its surrounding desert sit within Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the first national recreation area established by the National Park Service. The dam itself stands 726 feet tall, rising from the canyon floor.
The lake has been falling for more than two decades. A pale band of mineral deposit, the so-called bathtub ring, climbs the canyon walls where higher water once reached, recording a drier Colorado River basin since the early 2000s. The Bureau of Reclamation tracks the surface elevation daily; in recent years it has dropped near 1,050 feet, well below the 1,229-foot full-pool mark. The water that remains still reads turquoise against the red and ochre rock, the contrast that gives the view from the dam its weight.
Black Canyon, where the dam sits, is cut into Miocene volcanic rock: andesite and tuff layered with sandstone. The walls run dark brown and rust where they fall to the water, paler where the receded lake has exposed bleached stone. Engineers chose the site in the 1920s for the narrowness of the gorge and the soundness of the rock, which made the arch-gravity design possible. Above the dam, the cliffs hold most of the day's heat into evening. The Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman bypass bridge crosses 890 feet above the river just downstream.