Elk bugling at Estes Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— a single high note across the cold meadow.
Not only on a wall.
“The herd comes down from the high country as the air turns. Bulls walk into Moraine Park and Horseshoe Park most evenings through September and into October, and a single bugle carries across the grass in a way the maps do not tell you about. It is a long rising whistle that drops into something almost mechanical at the end. The cows graze. The cars pull over and the windows go down. Nobody talks much. The Front Range stands behind it all, the same range it has stood through for ten thousand autumns.
Elk bugling at Estes 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.
Estes Park is a Colorado town of about 5,900 residents in southwestern Larimer County, at the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park and at an elevation of 7,658 feet. It sits in a glacial valley along the Big Thompson River, with the Front Range, the easternmost rampart of the Colorado Rockies, climbing to the west. The park itself was established in 1915 as the nation's tenth national park and protects 415 square miles of montane forest and alpine tundra. Longs Peak rises to 14,259 feet on the southwestern skyline. Moraine Park and Horseshoe Park, the two large meadows just inside the east boundary, are the places the elk come down to most evenings in late summer and fall.
The elk rut runs from early September through mid-October, with peak bugling activity in late September. Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus canadensis nelsoni) move down from the high alpine basins to the lower meadows as the days shorten, and bulls compete for harems through bugle calls and antler displays. The National Park Service closes Moraine Park, Horseshoe Park, Upper Beaver Meadows, Harbison Meadow, and Holzwarth Meadow to foot traffic between 5 p.m. and 10 a.m. for the duration of the rut, so viewing is from the roadside pull-offs rather than from inside the grass. The aspen turn gold along Bear Lake Road in the same window, which folds two of the park's annual events into one.
A bull elk bugle carries well at high elevation because cold dense air transmits sound farther than warm summer air. At Estes Park's 7,658 feet, autumn nights drop into the 30s Fahrenheit by late September, and the meadows hold the cold close to the ground after sunset. The call begins as a long rising whistle and ends in a cascade of deep grunts, the rising note audible across much of a mile in still conditions. It is partly territorial and partly advertisement, broadcasting the bull's size and fitness to rival males and to receptive cows. Roughly 3,000 elk move through the park and the surrounding Estes Valley, the largest population concentrated on this east side.