Patagonia Lake State Park
— — a green lake in dry country, where the trogons come.
Not only on a wall.
“A small reservoir held in mesquite and oak grassland, a hundred miles south of Tucson. Sonoita Creek was dammed in 1968 and the water has been pulling birds out of the sky ever since. Elegant trogons in the side canyons in summer, vermilion flycatchers along the shore, and the kind of quiet that only border country has in the early morning. — from the studio
Patagonia Lake State Park, 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.
Patagonia Lake sits in Santa Cruz County, about eighteen miles north of the Mexican border at Nogales and a hundred miles south of Tucson. The 265-acre reservoir was created in 1968 when Sonoita Creek was dammed in a narrow oak-and-mesquite canyon at roughly 3,870 feet of elevation. Arizona State Parks took over management in 1975, and the surrounding Sonoita Creek State Natural Area protects the riparian corridor downstream. The lake reaches about ninety feet at its deepest point along the old creek channel.
The lake sits inside one of the richest birding corridors in North America. The Madrean Sky Islands push south from here into Mexico, and the species that ride that ladder of mountains arrive here in spring. Elegant trogons nest in the sycamore canyons above the lake. Vermilion flycatchers work the shoreline year-round. Tucson Audubon counts more than three hundred species recorded in the park, and the pontoon birding tour the rangers run on cool weekend mornings is one of the quietest hours in Arizona.
Daytime highs at the lake run from the low sixties in January to the high nineties in June, and the desert pulls a hard temperature drop after sundown all year. The bird season peaks twice — April through May for spring migration and again in late summer when the monsoon greens the grassland. Largemouth bass and crappie fishing holds through most of the year. The campground takes reservations up to twelve months out and fills first on the long weekends between October and April.