Bachelor Loop Creede San Juans Ceramic Art Tile
— — the road silver carved and the aspens kept.
Not only on a wall.
“A seventeen-mile dirt loop above the last silver town in Colorado. The road climbs out of Creede into the Bachelor mining district, past the Commodore and Amethyst headframes, through aspen so thick that the second week of October the whole canyon turns gold. The volcanic walls of the Creede caldera show in red and chalk above the road. Most passenger cars manage the lower half in dry weather; the high cut to the Bachelor townsite wants clearance. Worth the slow drive for the way the light works on the tailings.
Bachelor Loop Creede San Juans Ceramic Art Tile, 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.
The Bachelor Historic Tour is a 17-mile dirt loop in the Rio Grande National Forest above Creede, the seat of Mineral County and the last silver boom town in Colorado. Creede sits at 8,799 feet at the head of the Rio Grande, about 250 miles southwest of Denver and 120 miles northeast of Durango. The route climbs out of town on Forest Service Road 503, follows West Willow Creek up to the Bachelor townsite at roughly 10,400 feet, then drops back down East Willow Creek. Mineral County is one of the least populated in Colorado, with about 800 residents across an area larger than Rhode Island.
The Bachelor district produced silver, lead, and zinc from veins inside the rim of the Creede caldera, a volcanic collapse structure formed about 26.9 million years ago in one of the largest eruptions of the San Juan volcanic field. The vein system runs along the caldera's ring fractures. Nicholas C. Creede struck the Holy Moses lode in 1889, the Amethyst followed in 1891, and at the peak of the boom in 1892 the district shipped over a million dollars of silver each month. The headframes of the Commodore Mine still stand along East Willow Creek above the road.
The Bachelor Loop opens for the year when the snow clears the upper switchbacks, usually around Memorial Day, and closes when the first heavy snow shuts the high cut, typically in late October or early November. The window most drivers come for is the third week of September through the first week of October, when the aspen along East and West Willow creeks turn gold and copper. Wildflower season runs late June through July in the meadows below 10,000 feet. The Rocky Mountain monsoon brings near-daily afternoon thunderstorms in July and August, so morning drives are safer.