Chasm Lake Rocky Mountain National Park Ceramic Art Tile
— — the blue the cliff holds in shadow.
Not only on a wall.
“Chasm Lake fills a glacial cirque at 11,760 feet on the east side of Longs Peak, the only fourteener in Rocky Mountain National Park. The Diamond rises directly above the water, a thousand feet of vertical granite that stays dark even at noon. The trail from the Longs Peak Trailhead climbs four miles to reach the outlet, the last stretch across slabs above Peacock Pool. Mills Glacier still holds snow under the wall into late summer. Climbers stage from the shore before dawn for the long routes up the face. Most people who reach the lake stay quiet a while, then turn back down.
Chasm Lake Rocky Mountain National Park 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.
Chasm Lake sits at 11,760 feet (3,584 m) in Rocky Mountain National Park, in north-central Colorado about ten miles south of Estes Park. The lake fills a glacial cirque on the east side of Longs Peak, the only fourteener in the park, at 14,259 feet. The trail leaves the Longs Peak Trailhead off Colorado Highway 7 and climbs 2,400 feet over 4.2 miles, branching from the Keyhole Route at Chasm Junction. The final approach crosses granite slabs above Peacock Pool before the lake opens up directly beneath the Diamond, the sheer thousand-foot east face that David Rearick and Bob Kamps first climbed in 1960. Mills Glacier holds the snow at the base of the wall.
The Diamond is the cleanest rectangle of the sheer east face of Longs Peak, rising about 945 feet from Broadway, the ledge that splits the wall, to the summit ridge. The rock is Silver Plume granite, intruded as a Precambrian pluton roughly 1.4 billion years ago, then unroofed and carved by Pleistocene glaciers. The wall stayed unclimbed until 1960; the National Park Service had refused permission for years before Rearick and Kamps were finally allowed up. The named routes on the Diamond, among them the Casual Route, Pervertical Sanctuary, and the Yellow Wall, anchor American big-wall alpine climbing. Chasm Lake takes the wall's shadow for most of the day.
The Chasm Lake trail is hikable July through September, when the snow is off the upper slabs. Round trip is 8.4 miles with 2,400 feet of gain, and the Park Service rates it strenuous; altitude above 11,000 feet matters more than the distance. Rangers advise leaving the trailhead by sunrise to be below treeline before afternoon storms, which build over the Front Range almost daily in summer. The Longs Peak Trailhead has a small parking lot that fills before dawn on summer weekends. Park admission is $30 per vehicle for seven days, with no separate fee for Chasm Lake. The water is too cold and too high for swimming and sits just above freezing into August.