Maroon Bells reflection Elk Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the iron red the lake holds before the wind.
Not only on a wall.
“Two peaks above Maroon Lake, west of Aspen, in a glacial bowl walked by everyone who ever wanted to photograph a mountain. The reflection only holds for about the first half-hour after sunrise, before the wind reaches the water. After that the bells stay maroon all day, but the doubled image is gone. Photographers come up the road from Aspen Highlands before light, set their tripods along the north shore, and wait without saying much. The aspens behind them turn gold the third week of September.
Maroon Bells reflection Elk 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.
Two peaks at the head of Maroon Creek, in the Elk Mountains of Colorado's White River National Forest. Maroon Peak rises to 14,163 feet (4,316 m); North Maroon Peak to 14,019 feet (4,273 m), separated by about a third of a mile of ridge. The pair sits roughly ten miles west of Aspen, reflected in Maroon Lake at an elevation of about 9,580 feet (2,920 m). Both peaks lie inside the Maroon Bells–Snowmass Wilderness, designated in 1964 under the original Wilderness Act and now covering about 181,000 acres of the White River National Forest. Access from Aspen Highlands runs up Maroon Creek Road, which carries a shuttle-and-permit system during the summer and autumn months.
The maroon comes from the rock itself. The Bells are carved from the Maroon Formation, a Pennsylvanian-to-early-Permian sedimentary sequence of mudstone, siltstone, and sandstone laid down roughly 300 million years ago when this part of Colorado lay near the equator. Hematite, an iron oxide, gives the rock its red-brown cast and holds the colour the same wet or dry, summer or winter. The same formation runs north through the Roaring Fork valley and shows along Schofield Pass, but on the Bells it stands higher than anywhere else it surfaces in the state. Climbers know the rock is also brittle and poorly cemented, the reason the U.S. Forest Service has long called the pair the Deadly Bells on its trailhead sign.
Maroon Creek Road, the only paved road in, is closed to private vehicles during the high season, generally from mid-May through late October between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Visitors during those hours park at Aspen Highlands and ride the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority shuttle the ten miles to Maroon Lake. A separate parking reservation is required outside shuttle hours and during the shoulder window when the road reopens to cars; reservations are issued through Recreation.gov and tend to sell out within minutes during fall colour weekends in mid-to-late September. There is a per-person fee for the shuttle and a per-vehicle fee for the road, with proceeds going to the White River National Forest and to wilderness maintenance.