Mendocino Headlands
— a meadow that ends in sea arches.
Not only on a wall.
“The headlands wrap three sides of Mendocino village, a former lumber town built in New England style on the Northern California coast. Bluff-top trails cross a wildflower meadow and end at sea arches and blowholes. Most of the year a marine fog sits offshore and moves in by afternoon. Gray whales pass close in winter and spring. The Big River empties to the south, and the village's redwood water towers hold the skyline. The light is the kind that turns silver before it turns blue. Nobody hurries here.
Mendocino Headlands, 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.
Mendocino Headlands State Park covers roughly 347 acres on the Pacific coast in Mendocino County, about 155 miles north of San Francisco along Highway 1. The park surrounds the village of Mendocino on three sides, with bluff-top trails that lead to sea arches, sea caves, and a string of small coves. To the south, the Big River empties into the Pacific at Big River Beach; to the north, the trails skirt the village and join the coastal path past the Ford House Visitor Center, an 1854 redwood building that anchors the park's history. Mendocino itself, founded in 1852 as a lumber port, is designated a National Historic Landmark District for its preserved 19th-century redwood architecture.
The headland cliffs face the Pacific with sandstone the ocean has been carving for thousands of years into a long inventory of arches, blowholes, sea stacks, caves, and small coves along the bluff edge. Some arches collapse and re-form within a single human lifetime; the Northern California coast is geologically active enough that the map changes generation to generation. South of the village the Big River meets the ocean at Big River Beach, the entrance to a long estuary added to the park system in 2002. North of town a flat trail follows the cliff above Portuguese Beach toward Russian Gulch State Park. The surf is constant and loud, and the air carries salt in a way the inland visitor notices first.
Two cycles shape the year on the headlands. The first is the wildflower bloom, which runs roughly March through May across the bluff-top meadows: wild iris, sea thrift, and coastal lupine along the trail edges, with paintbrush and yellow bush lupine in the longer grass. The second is the gray whale migration. Pacific gray whales pass close to the Mendocino coast on their southern run in December and January and again northbound from March into May, often within sight of the cliffs. Mendocino's annual Whale Festival, run by the village since the 1980s, marks the spring half of that passage. The headland trails stay open through the year, but the wind on the bluffs picks up sharply from November to February.