Cheyenne Mountain Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the granite where the city ends.
Not only on a wall.
“A granite ridge on the eastern edge of the Front Range, the mountain Colorado Springs grew up beside. The Broadmoor sits at its foot. The zoo climbs the lower slopes, the highest of any zoo in the country. Somewhere inside the granite, a Cold War door opens onto the NORAD complex; the mountain holds its public faces and its quiet ones at once. In the late afternoon the east face catches alpenglow and the city below begins to dim. People who live here mark the seasons by where the snow line sits.
Cheyenne Mountain Front 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.
Cheyenne Mountain rises on the eastern edge of Colorado's Front Range, immediately south of Colorado Springs in El Paso County. The summit reaches 9,565 feet (2,915 metres), and the ridge forms the abrupt boundary between the high plains and the Rocky Mountain front. Cheyenne Mountain State Park sits on the western flank, established in 2006 and covering roughly 2,701 acres of trails, woodland, and gambel oak. The Broadmoor resort and Cheyenne Mountain Zoo sit on the lower eastern slopes. Pikes Peak rises about fifteen miles to the northwest, the other anchor of the Pikes Peak region. The mountain is the southern bookend of the Front Range as it meets Colorado Springs.
The mountain is Pikes Peak granite, a Mesoproterozoic intrusive rock about 1.08 billion years old. It is part of the same batholith that built Pikes Peak itself, exposed by tens of millions of years of uplift and erosion as the Front Range rose. The granite weathers into the rounded outcrops and boulder fields visible along Dixon Trail and Talon Trail in the state park. The blast doors of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, hung in the mid-1960s as the underground command centre for NORAD, were sunk into roughly 2,000 feet of this same granite. The mountain is one of the few in America that holds a resort, a zoo, a shrine, and a hardened command bunker inside the same body of stone.
The eastern slope holds the densest cluster of public attractions on any Front Range mountain. The Broadmoor, opened in 1918 by Spencer Penrose, sits at the foot. Cheyenne Mountain Zoo climbs to about 6,800 feet, the highest-altitude zoo in the United States, home to one of the largest reticulated giraffe herds in any American zoo. Above the zoo stands the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun, a five-storey stone tower Penrose built between 1934 and 1937 in memory of the humorist; it offers a long view east across the plains. Cheyenne Mountain State Park, on the western side, opened to the public in 2006 and holds about twenty miles of trail. The summit itself is closed to visitors, occupied by Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station.