Cottonwood Hot Springs Sawatch Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the heat the mountain keeps.
Not only on a wall.
“Five outdoor mineral pools at the foot of the Collegiate Peaks, on the road that climbs to Cottonwood Pass. The water carries lithium, sits between 94 and 110 degrees, and steams hard against the cold. The spring is named for the cottonwoods along the creek that runs past it. Locals out of Buena Vista come in winter, after work, when the steam reads thickest. No music. No resort scaffolding. Just the pools, the creek, and the mountains.
Cottonwood Hot Springs Sawatch 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.
Cottonwood Hot Springs sits in the Arkansas River Valley west of Buena Vista, Colorado, at the eastern foot of the Sawatch Range. The springs rise along Cottonwood Creek, on County Road 306, the road that climbs to Cottonwood Pass and drops into Taylor Park on the other side. The Sawatch Range carries fifteen of Colorado's 14,000-foot summits, including Mount Elbert at roughly 14,440 feet, the highest point in the Rocky Mountains, and the cluster known as the Collegiate Peaks: Mount Princeton, Mount Yale, Mount Harvard, Mount Columbia, Mount Oxford. The springs sit about five miles west of town along the creek they're named for, open every day of the year.
The water comes up at temperatures between 94 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit across five outdoor pools, carrying a measurable lithium content that gives the springs a long-standing reputation among Colorado soakers. Cottonwood Creek runs past the pools cold, fed by snowmelt off the Collegiate Peaks. The pairing of geothermal heat coming up through fault lines into a high-altitude valley still under spring snow is what creates the visible steam plumes that read thickest at first light and again after sundown. The Ute people knew the springs before any settler did. The current bathhouse and pools are run by Cottonwood Hot Springs Inn and Spa, on land that has operated as a working hot-springs property since the late nineteenth century.
The springs are open every day of the year but are most striking from late October through April, when the contrast between the heat of the water and the cold of the surrounding range is at its widest. Cottonwood Pass above the springs closes seasonally, usually mid-November through late May, which makes the springs the end of the paved road for half the year. The high summer brings a different crowd: through-hikers off the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness loops coming down for an evening soak. Buena Vista sits at roughly 7,965 feet, so even August nights run cool enough that the steam still reads in the photographs.