Breckenridge Main Street winter Tenmile Range Ceramic Art Tile
— a gold-rush street under the high white range.
Not only on a wall.
“A gold-rush Main Street with the Tenmile Range right behind it. The Victorian storefronts down the street go back to the 1880s, when this was a strike town. The white wall above them is the back of Peaks 1 through 10, looking down from the floor of the Blue River valley. Quandary, a fourteener, is up there too, just out of frame. In December the street holds the cold, and the snow stays where it lands.
Breckenridge Main Street winter Tenmile Range 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.
Breckenridge sits in Summit County, Colorado, at an elevation of about 9,600 feet (2,926 m), on the floor of the Blue River valley with the Tenmile Range rising directly to the west. The town was founded in 1859 during the Colorado Gold Rush and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities on the Western Slope. Main Street, which runs along Colorado Highway 9, is the spine of the Breckenridge Historic District. The town is reached from Denver via Interstate 70 to Frisco, then south on Highway 9. About 80 miles in fair weather, longer when the passes drift in.
The street holds about two hundred and fifty historic structures, most built between 1880 and 1920, when Breckenridge worked silver and gold seams in the surrounding hills. The Breckenridge Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and covers most of the original town grid. The false-front commercial buildings along Main Street, many in painted clapboard, some in masonry, form one of the most substantial Victorian mining-town streetscapes in the Colorado high country. Behind them, the Tenmile peaks (Peak 1 through Peak 10) and the fourteener Quandary Peak (14,265 ft / 4,348 m) close the view to the west.
Snow holds in Breckenridge from November well into April. The ski resort above town reports more than 300 inches (762 cm) of snowfall in a typical season, and the town floor sees roughly half of that. December and January are the deep months, when Main Street wears its holiday lights for a long evening that begins in mid-afternoon. Daytime highs in January average around 30°F (-1°C); nighttime lows run in the single digits and lower. The light at this elevation is sharp, and the Tenmile Range is at its whitest. Roads stay open in most weather; chains or all-wheel drive are sensible for the drive up from Denver.