Devils Postpile
— the columns the glacier polished from above.
Not only on a wall.
“A wall of basalt columns about sixty feet tall, at the end of a half-mile walk through lodgepole pines in the Sierra Nevada. The lava cooled and cracked into hexagons eighty thousand years ago; a glacier later passed over the top and polished the column-ends smooth. The road in opens for a few months each summer and closes when the snow returns. Most of the year the monument belongs to the river and the marmots.
Devils Postpile, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Devils Postpile National Monument sits at about 7,560 feet in the Sierra Nevada, in California's Madera County, just west of the Sierra Crest from the town of Mammoth Lakes. The Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River runs past the base of the formation. The monument covers roughly 800 acres and was carved out of the surrounding Inyo National Forest by presidential proclamation in 1911, after this section was excluded from Yosemite National Park during the 1905 boundary revision. Access is from Mammoth Mountain by a single narrow mountain road that is plowed open only between June and October; for most of the summer the National Park Service requires visitors to ride a mandatory shuttle bus from the Mammoth Mountain Adventure Center.
The columns are basalt, formed when a single lava flow some 82,000 years ago pooled against an ice-dammed valley, cooled slowly, and contracted into a network of polygonal cracks. The cracks propagated downward through the cooling rock, producing the tall columns visible today. Most have six sides; the rest have three to seven. The wall stands about 60 feet at its tallest. Tens of thousands of years later, a glacier overrode the basalt and quarried away the upper part, leaving a polished pavement of column-tops reached by a short trail above the main wall. The same cooling geometry produced Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and Fingal's Cave in Scotland; the glacial polish on the top surface is what sets Devils Postpile apart.
The narrow paved road into the monument drops from Minaret Vista to the canyon of the Middle Fork, descending roughly 1,700 feet over about seven miles. It opens around the third week of June and closes in mid-October when the first heavy snow falls. From mid-June through early September the National Park Service runs a mandatory shuttle bus from the Mammoth Mountain Adventure Center; outside those dates private vehicles may drive in. From the ranger station a half-mile trail through lodgepole pine reaches the base of the columns. A 2.5-mile trail leads downstream to Rainbow Falls, a 101-foot drop on the Middle Fork named for the rainbow that forms in its spray on summer afternoons.