Tucson skyline against the Catalinas
— — a low city held against a mile-high wall.
Not only on a wall.
“A modest downtown of brick and adobe spread across the desert floor, with the Santa Catalina Mountains rising nine thousand feet behind it in one unbroken wall. Mount Lemmon sits at the far end of the range, snow-dusted in winter and cool enough in July to grow apples. The saguaros come down to the city limits. Late afternoon, the granite turns the colour of a banked fire, and the office towers downtown go to silhouette before the foothills do. from the studio
Tucson skyline against the Catalinas, 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.
Tucson sits on the floor of a broad Sonoran Desert basin in Pima County, Arizona, at about 2,389 feet of elevation, the second-largest city in the state with a metro population around a million. The Santa Catalina Mountains rise immediately to the north, topping out at Mount Lemmon at 9,157 feet, a vertical relief of nearly seven thousand feet across about ten horizontal miles. The Tohono O'odham have lived in the basin for thousands of years; the present city traces its Spanish founding to the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson in 1775.
The Catalinas catch the last light long after the basin has gone into shade. The granite of the Pusch Ridge and the south face turns red-orange in the final twenty minutes of the day, a phenomenon locally called the Catalina alpenglow. Photographers gather at Gates Pass on the west side of town and at the foot of Sabino Canyon Road in the foothills. The geometry is unusual for an American city: a mountain wall of true alpine relief stands directly above a desert downtown, with no foothill buffer of significant scale to soften the rise.
Mount Lemmon's summit, twenty-five road miles from downtown Tucson on the Catalina Highway, sits in a pine forest cool enough to support a small ski area and a working apple orchard. The drive climbs through seven plant communities in roughly an hour, the ecological equivalent of driving from Mexico to Canada. Winter brings snow to the upper Catalinas while saguaros stand bare-trunked on the basin floor below. The Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, run by the University of Arizona, opens its 32-inch telescope to public night programs.