Roosevelt Lake
— — the desert holding a long blue mirror.
Not only on a wall.
“A reservoir on the Salt River, held back by the Theodore Roosevelt Dam since 1911. The water sits between the Superstition Wilderness and the Sierra Ancha, ringed by saguaros that come right down to the shoreline. The bridge that crosses it is a slim steel arch, painted the same blue as the lake on a clear morning. Houseboats drift in the coves below Schoolhouse Point. The desert does not usually keep this much water in one place, and the surface holds the sky in a way the surrounding country never does. from the studio
Roosevelt Lake, 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.
Theodore Roosevelt Lake sits in the Tonto Basin about 80 miles northeast of Phoenix, formed where Theodore Roosevelt Dam closed the Salt River in 1911. At full pool the reservoir runs roughly 22 miles long and holds the largest body of water entirely inside Arizona. The lake is the centrepiece of the Salt River Project, the system that brought irrigated agriculture to the Phoenix valley. The shoreline belongs to Tonto National Forest, the fifth-largest national forest in the country at about 2.9 million acres, and the lake sits between two designated wilderness areas, the Superstition and the Sierra Ancha.
The dam itself is the reason the lake exists, and the bridge above it is the reason the road still runs. Roosevelt Dam was the tallest masonry dam in the world when it was finished in 1911, faced in cyclopean blocks of local sandstone cut from the canyon walls. It was raised and re-faced in concrete in the 1990s and now stands 357 feet above the streambed. Just downstream, the Roosevelt Lake Bridge opened in 1990, a steel arch spanning 1,080 feet — at the time the longest two-lane single-span steel-arch bridge in North America. Both structures are National Historic Landmarks.
The lake is open year-round, but the colour and the crowd shift with the calendar. Spring, after a wet winter, brings the highest water and a rim of wildflowers across the surrounding desert — poppies and lupine on the slopes above Schoolhouse Point. Summer is hot, often above 100°F in the basin, and the houseboats move out to the deeper coves. Autumn is the steadiest season for clear light, when the saguaros on the south shore throw long shadows by late afternoon. The reservoir draws down through the dry months and the high-water line shows pale on the rocks.