Mitchell Caverns
— — the eyes of the mountain, half open.
Not only on a wall.
“Two limestone caves in the Providence Mountains, 4,300 feet up, with a third the rangers keep closed. The Chemehuevi called them the eyes of the mountain. Two dark openings on the side of a slope you can see from a long way off. Tours run Friday through Sunday, fifteen at a time, from a small visitor centre at the end of a sixteen-mile spur off I-40. Inside, the air sits in the sixties, summer and winter. Outside, the cholla, the barrel cactus, the Mojave yucca. The same desert Jack Mitchell walked into in 1929 looking for silver, and stayed for the limestone.
Mitchell Caverns, 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.
Mitchell Caverns sits at 4,300 feet in the Providence Mountains of San Bernardino County, California, inside Mojave National Preserve and managed by California State Parks as Providence Mountains State Recreation Area. The drive in is sixteen miles northwest from I-40, off the Essex Road exit; the nearest fuel is in Fenner, twenty-four miles back, and the nearest town with full services is Needles, fifty-six miles away. Two limestone caves are open to visitors, Tecopa and El Pakiva, with a third, Cave of the Winding Stair, kept closed since the early years. The Chemehuevi people knew the place long before the road was paved, and called the twin openings the eyes of the mountain.
The caves were dissolved out of a thick sequence of Permian limestone, formed when groundwater carrying carbonic acid worked through the rock before the Pleistocene. What it left behind is what tours come to see: stalactites, stalagmites, and the bumpy clusters speleologists call cave coral, all of it calcium carbonate set down drop by drop. Mitchell Caverns is the only limestone cave system in the California State Park network, which is one reason the U.S. Department of the Interior named it a National Natural Landmark in 1975. The rangers cap each tour at fifteen people to slow the wear on the formations, which are still actively growing.
Tours are by reservation only, booked through ReserveCalifornia.com under Providence Mountains SRA, and the park runs them Friday through Sunday plus holiday Mondays from September through June. July and August the park is closed for the season; the desert outside runs well past 100°F. A tour costs twenty dollars for adults, ten for children sixteen and under, and runs about two hours, including a one-and-a-half-mile round-trip walk from the visitor centre. Each group is capped at fifteen. There is no water on the trail and no fuel for twenty-four miles in either direction, so most visitors come down from Las Vegas or up from Twentynine Palms for the day.