Great Basin Desert
— — a cold desert that hides under the sky.
Not only on a wall.
“The eastern edge of California, where the Sierra Nevada drops into a cold high-desert basin that drains nowhere; every stream that begins here ends in a lake or a salt flat, not the sea. Mono Lake, the Owens Valley, the White Mountains. Sagebrush from horizon to horizon. The light is hard and the silence carries. Pinyon and juniper hold the slopes where the basin meets the mountains.
Great Basin Desert, 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.
The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic (internally drained) watersheds in North America, covering about 540,000 square kilometres across Nevada, western Utah, and the eastern edges of California, Oregon and Idaho. The California portion runs east of the Sierra Nevada crest, through Mono and Inyo Counties, from Mono Lake south through the Owens Valley and the White and Inyo Mountains. The desert is cold and high; most of it sits above 1,200 metres, and winter snow is normal.
The basin holds some of the lowest night-time sound levels in the contiguous United States. There are stretches of US 6 and US 50 (the latter long marketed as the Loneliest Road in America) where the next house is more than thirty miles in either direction. Mono Basin and the White Mountains lie within the Inyo National Forest; the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest at roughly 3,000 metres holds individual trees over 4,800 years old, among the oldest known living organisms on earth.
The Great Basin has four real seasons, not the two of the hot deserts to the south. Winter brings snow at every elevation, and the Sierra rain shadow keeps total precipitation low, typically 150 to 300 millimetres a year on the basin floor. Spring is brief and green. Summer is hot in daylight and cold at night, with the diurnal swing routinely above 20°C at higher elevations. Autumn is the long quiet shoulder, when the cottonwoods along the Owens River turn gold and the visitor traffic falls away.