Long Lake below Pawnee Pass Indian Peaks Ceramic Art Tile
— — the morning the pass came down to the water.
Not only on a wall.
“The first lake on the Pawnee Pass trail, a half-mile in from the Brainard Lake gate. Subalpine spruce and fir to the shore, then the ridge: Shoshoni and Pawnee, with the pass between them. On a still morning the whole skyline comes down into the water. Most hikers walk past on their way up to Lake Isabelle, another mile higher, and to the pass beyond. They keep moving. The lake holds what they pass through.
Long Lake below Pawnee Pass Indian Peaks 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.
Long Lake sits at 10,521 feet on the eastern flank of the Continental Divide, in the Indian Peaks Wilderness of north-central Colorado. The wilderness was designated by Congress in 1978 and covers about 73,391 acres of the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, sharing a boundary with the southern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. The lake is reached from the Long Lake Trailhead at the west end of the Brainard Lake Recreation Area, roughly an hour west of Boulder by way of the town of Ward. Above the lake the Pawnee Pass Trail climbs another four and a half miles to the pass itself at 12,542 feet, on the line between Boulder and Grand counties.
The Pawnee Pass headwall rises another two thousand vertical feet above Long Lake's surface, climbing through krummholz and tundra to the divide at 12,542 feet. The lake itself sits a thousand feet below tree line, held by subalpine spruce and fir along its lower shore. Mornings are reliably the calmest hour. By eleven the afternoon thermals lift off the meltwater meadows north of the lake and the surface goes from glass to riffle. Most hikers keep climbing toward Lake Isabelle, another mile up, leaving Long Lake to the people who came to see the reflection rather than the pass.
Brainard Lake Road usually opens in mid-June, once snow clears the upper switchbacks, and closes in mid-October. During the open season the Forest Service requires a timed-entry parking reservation at the trailheads inside the recreation area. The 2026 fee is sixteen dollars for a personal vehicle, or two dollars with an America the Beautiful pass; walk-in entry at the Gateway Trailhead is ten dollars. Reservations release on a rolling fifteen-day window and weekend slots fill within the first hour. From the Long Lake Trailhead the lake itself is a half-mile of nearly level trail.