Pawnee Buttes on the plains Ceramic Art Tile
— — what was left after the wind took everything else.
Not only on a wall.
“Two sandstone-capped buttes rising about 250 feet above the shortgrass plains of Weld County, northeastern Colorado. From the trailhead the path drops into a small wash and the buttes appear one at a time, the way they do when you come at them on foot. James Michener used them in Centennial; he called them Rattlesnake Buttes. Most of the year you can walk to the base of the west butte. From March through June the north side closes for the raptors nesting in the cliffs: golden eagles, prairie falcons, ferruginous hawks. No shade. No water. Bring both.
Pawnee Buttes on the plains 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.
The Pawnee Buttes rise from the shortgrass prairie of the Pawnee National Grassland, a 193,000-acre tract in Weld County, northeastern Colorado, administered by the U.S. Forest Service through the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests. The two buttes, known locally as West Pawnee Butte and East Pawnee Butte, stand roughly 250 feet above the surrounding plain at summit elevations near 5,375 feet. The site sits about 40 miles east of Greeley, reached by Colorado Highway 14 to the small town of Briggsdale and then roughly 15 miles of gravel county road to the trailhead. The Pawnee Buttes Trail runs about 1.5 miles each way from the parking area, dropping through a shallow wash before emerging on the open plain.
The buttes are erosional remnants: pillars of softer Brule and Chadron Formation siltstone and claystone, capped by a more resistant layer of Ogallala Formation sandstone and conglomerate roughly five million years old. Without that cap, the underlying strata would have weathered away with the rest of the plain. Geologists call the mechanism differential erosion, and the same process built the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon and the toadstool rocks of southern Utah. The Pawnee escarpment, a long bluff just north of the buttes, exposes the same layer cake in section. Walk close and you can see the soft chalky bands of the lower formations crumbling out from beneath the harder cap.
The trailhead lies at the end of roughly 15 miles of well-graded gravel road north of Briggsdale; passenger cars manage it in dry weather, but rain turns the bentonite-rich surface slick. The Pawnee Buttes Trail is open year-round, but the U.S. Forest Service closes the north overlook spur and the area beneath the cliffs from March 1 through June 30 each year to protect nesting raptors: ferruginous hawks, prairie falcons, and golden eagles among them. There is no water at the trailhead, no shade on the trail, and cell service is unreliable. Early morning and late afternoon in spring and fall are kindest. Summer afternoons regularly clear 95°F on the open plain.