Mountain goats on Bierstadt Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the herd that finds you above the willows.
Not only on a wall.
“The hike begins in a knee-high willow bog above Guanella Pass and climbs into the bouldered upper third where the mountain goats live. They are not afraid of people anymore. A small band, sometimes a dozen, sometimes thirty, will work the talus a hundred feet off the trail, then drift across the path between summit pushes. The white coats look impossible against the slate-grey rock and the sky that thin air gives back. The goats are not native to Colorado; the state seeded them in the 1940s and they took. The atlas wants Bierstadt for the meeting, not the summit.
Mountain goats on Bierstadt 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.
Mount Bierstadt rises to 14,065 feet (4,287 m) on the Continental Divide flank of the Colorado Front Range, about an hour west of Denver in the Mount Blue Sky Wilderness (renamed from Mount Evans Wilderness in 2023). The standard trail leaves the parking area on Guanella Pass at 11,669 feet and climbs roughly 2,850 feet across willow flats, talus, and a steep upper boulder field to the summit, a round trip of about seven miles. The peak is named for Albert Bierstadt, the Hudson River School painter whose 1863 ascent with the surveyor Ferdinand Hayden was its first recorded climb.
Above the willow line on Bierstadt, the trail enters the alpine tundra zone where oxygen at the summit is about 60 percent of what it is at sea level. The mountain goat, Oreamnos americanus, is built for this air: a hollow double coat, cloven hooves with rubbery pads for traction on wet rock, and a circulatory system that holds onto oxygen at altitude. The Bierstadt herd is one of the most-visible in the state, regularly grazing the same talus fields the trail crosses near 13,500 feet. They were not here before 1947; the Colorado Game and Fish Department began transplanting Montana and Idaho stock that year, and the population spread south through the Sawatch and the Front Range.
The Bierstadt trail is one of the most-hiked fourteeners in the country because the Guanella Pass road brings cars to 11,669 feet, leaving only the upper third of the mountain to do on foot. The parking lot fills before dawn on summer weekends; climbers typically start by five in the morning to be off the ridge before the afternoon thunderstorms that build daily in July and August. The road closes from the Georgetown side in late October and reopens after the snowmelt in May, leaving roughly five months for the climb. Mountain-goat encounters happen most often on the upper boulder field. Stay back fifty yards, do not feed them, and let the goats decide whether to cross the trail.