Castle Peak Elk Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the fortress the snow won't leave.
Not only on a wall.
“The highest summit in the Elk Range, holding its own basin of snow well past midsummer. Twelve miles south of Aspen, reached from the dirt of Castle Creek Road and a long walk into Montezuma Basin. The rock here runs grey and granitic, not the rusted red of the Maroon Bells next door. A different geology, a different light. On a clear morning the long northeast ridge catches the sun first, then the towers below. Climbers who come up early have the basin to themselves before the heat of the day.
Castle Peak Elk 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.
Castle Peak is the highest summit in Colorado's Elk Mountains, rising to 14,265 feet (4,348 m) on the boundary between Pitkin and Gunnison counties. It sits inside the 181,535-acre Maroon Bells–Snowmass Wilderness, part of White River National Forest, roughly twelve miles south of Aspen. Access begins from Castle Creek Road, which leaves Colorado Highway 82 just outside town and runs south along Castle Creek toward the abandoned silver-mining settlement of Ashcroft. From there, a high-clearance four-wheel-drive road climbs into Montezuma Basin, the alpine cirque immediately below the peak. The standard ascent is a Class 2 scramble of the northeast ridge, which shares its high traverse with Conundrum Peak (13,981 feet) just to the northwest.
The rock that gives Castle Peak its silhouette is light-coloured granitic stone from a Tertiary igneous intrusion, slowly exposed by erosion of the older sediments that once covered it. Standing immediately beside it, the Maroon Bells take their rust-orange colour from the much older Maroon Formation, a thick sequence of red sandstone and shale laid down roughly 280 million years ago in the Pennsylvanian and Permian. The two sets of summits look almost nothing alike up close. Castle Peak's grey blocks fracture into the toothed turrets that earned the mountain its name, while its neighbour's softer red sediments shed loose scree by the bucket. The change in rock between the two summits is one of the strangest contrasts in the Elk Range.
The climbing window for Castle Peak runs from late June into September, once Montezuma Basin sheds enough snow to expose the northeast ridge. Even in mid-July the upper basin holds wide aprons of old snow, and a persistent snowfield clings to the north face below the summit. Afternoon thunderstorms build over the Elk Range almost daily through July and August, so most parties leave the trailhead between four and five in the morning to be off the ridge by noon. By late September snow returns to the upper mountain and the road into Montezuma Basin becomes impassable to most vehicles. Winter ascents are the domain of skiers and experienced mountaineers willing to work with avalanche-prone slopes.