Mills Lake at dusk Rocky Mountain National Park Ceramic Art Tile
— — the colour Longs Peak keeps after the sun is gone.
Not only on a wall.
“A subalpine lake at the mouth of Glacier Gorge in Rocky Mountain National Park, named for Enos Mills, the naturalist who walked the high country for years and made the case to Washington for the Park's protection. The water sits beneath Longs Peak and the Keyboard of the Winds. At dusk the granite catches the last of the light, what mountaineers call alpenglow, and the lake, glass-still for the few minutes after the wind drops, gives the colour back. Then the long blue. A two-and-a-half-mile walk from the Glacier Gorge Trailhead, climbing about seven hundred feet through stands of spruce and fir.
Mills Lake at dusk 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.
Mills Lake sits at roughly 9,940 feet (3,030 metres) at the entrance to Glacier Gorge in Rocky Mountain National Park, named for the naturalist Enos Mills (1870–1922), who built his cabin and operated Longs Peak Inn at the foot of the mountain and spent two decades lobbying Congress for the Park, established in 1915. The lake is reached on foot from the Glacier Gorge Trailhead, off Bear Lake Road on the east side of the Park, by a 2.6-mile trail that climbs about 750 feet through Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir, past Alberta Falls. Glacier Creek leaves the lake at its outlet and runs down the east face of the Park to join the Big Thompson River.
Alpenglow is the band of red, pink, and gold cast on snow and rock when the sun is below the horizon but still lighting the upper atmosphere. The effect happens at both ends of the day. At dusk it falls on the granite faces of Longs Peak (14,259 feet), Pagoda Mountain, and Chiefs Head Peak, which stand at the head of Glacier Gorge and frame the lake's far shore. The window is short, often eight to fifteen minutes after sunset, and depends on a clear west-facing horizon at the Front Range. On still evenings the lake's surface acts as a mirror and the peaks appear twice, once in stone and once in water.
The trail to Mills Lake starts at the Glacier Gorge Trailhead, off Bear Lake Road in the eastern half of Rocky Mountain National Park. Round trip is about 5.3 miles with roughly 750 feet of gain, and the route passes Alberta Falls before climbing the Glacier Knobs into the gorge. Between June and October the trail is generally snow-free in the lower section; the upper benches near the lake can hold drifts into July. The Bear Lake Road corridor operates under a timed-entry permit system in the high season, in addition to the standard Park entrance pass. The nearest town is Estes Park, about ten miles east of the trailhead via U.S. 36.