Wukoki Pueblo
— — a small fortress the wind never quite finishes.
Not only on a wall.
“A three-story sandstone block standing on its own outcrop, the colour of the rock it grew from. Wukoki is one of the smaller pueblos in the Wupatki basin, but it is the one that holds the eye — square-shouldered, deliberate, set against the Painted Desert and the distant San Francisco Peaks. The light at the end of the day turns the whole thing the colour of a banked fire. — from the studio
Wukoki 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.
Wukoki Pueblo stands inside Wupatki National Monument, about 35 miles northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. The structure was built and occupied by ancestral Puebloan people roughly between 1100 and 1250 CE, in the decades after the nearby eruption of Sunset Crater enriched the soil with volcanic ash. Wukoki sits on a freestanding Moenkopi sandstone outcrop overlooking the open basin toward the Painted Desert. A short paved spur from the monument's main loop road reaches the trailhead, and a quarter-mile path leads to the ruin itself.
The walls are coursed Moenkopi sandstone, set with mud mortar, rising directly from the outcrop they sit on. The tallest section reads as a small tower, three stories above the bedrock. The masonry is unusually intact for a structure of this age — the dry climate has preserved much of the original wall line, and the colour of the stone shifts through the day from rose to copper to a deep red at last light. The name Wukoki comes from a Hopi word often translated as 'big house' or 'tall house'.
Wupatki National Monument is open daily during daylight hours; a per-vehicle entrance fee covers both Wupatki and Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument on the same loop road. Wukoki itself is reached by a half-mile round-trip walk on a maintained path; visitors are asked to look but not enter or climb the ruin. Late afternoon and the hour before sunset are the strongest light. Summer afternoons run hot and exposed — water and a hat are practical.