Longs Peak Diamond face Rocky Mountain National Park Ceramic Art Tile
— — the wall the morning finds first.
Not only on a wall.
“A thousand-foot wall of pale granite at the head of Chasm Lake. The east face of Longs Peak, set back behind a ledge climbers call Broadway. The Diamond catches the morning before the valley does. A few minutes of pink and gold on cold rock at fourteen thousand feet. Climbers come in July and August when the snow has gone and the route is dry. From the lake below, the wall reads as a single sheet, no obvious break. The first ascent was in August 1960, by two climbers who took three days. It still looks the way it did then.
Longs Peak Diamond face 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.
Longs Peak rises to 14,259 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park, the highest summit in the park and the northernmost fourteener in the Rocky Mountains. The Diamond is the upper east face, a near-vertical wall of Silver Plume granite that rises roughly 1,000 feet from a ledge called Broadway to the summit ridge. The face sits above Chasm Lake at about 11,760 feet, reached by a 4.2-mile trail from the Longs Peak Trailhead off Colorado Highway 7, about ten miles south of Estes Park. The mountain is named for Stephen Harriman Long, the army explorer who recorded it during the 1820 Yellowstone Expedition along the South Platte River.
The Diamond is Silver Plume granite, a pale intrusive rock about 1.4 billion years old that makes up much of the Longs Peak massif. The face presents as a single near-uninterrupted sheet, around 1,000 feet tall, broken only by thin cracks and the occasional dihedral. The first ascent was made on August 1-3, 1960, by David Rearick and Bob Kamps, climbing the line now known as D1. Before 1960 the National Park Service forbade technical climbing on the face. The rock is known for clean edges and reliable cracks, though weather above 13,000 feet keeps the climbing window short. Most ascents go in five to ten pitches, with parties bivouacking on Broadway or at Chasm View.
The Diamond faces east, and at first light the granite turns the colour of rusted copper for about ten minutes before the rest of the cirque catches up. The face is roughly 1,000 feet of high-angle rock above 13,000 feet of elevation, so the sun reaches it long before it reaches Chasm Lake below. Climbers on the wall describe the moment as the rock going warm under the hands. Photographers shoot from the Chasm Lake outlet or from the meadows near Peacock Pool, an hour's walk in. The alpenglow window is short, twenty minutes around the equinoxes, and longest in late summer, when storm-clear mornings reliably follow afternoon thunder.