Roxborough State Park hogbacks Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the morning the ridge turns red.
Not only on a wall.
“Tilted red slabs of Fountain Formation sandstone, set on edge where the Great Plains finally hit the Rocky Mountains. Same stone that makes Red Rocks Amphitheatre and Garden of the Gods, but here it rises in a long ridge with a quiet trail under it. The park keeps a tight perimeter (no bikes, no dogs, no climbing), so the only sounds along the Fountain Valley loop are wind and the call of a scrub jay. Most mornings the ridge catches the sun about ten minutes before the prairie does.
Roxborough State Park hogbacks 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.
Roxborough State Park covers roughly 4,000 acres at the eastern foot of the Front Range, about 25 miles south of Denver in Douglas County. The hogbacks themselves are slabs of Fountain Formation sandstone, the same Pennsylvanian-age red rock that frames Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Morrison and Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, tilted nearly on end when the modern Rockies rose. The land became a Colorado state park in 1975 and was designated a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service in 1980. A visitor center near the main lot opens onto the Fountain Valley Trail, the easiest path among the slabs.
The slabs are Fountain Formation arkose, a coarse red sandstone that began as alluvial debris shed off the ancestral Rocky Mountains roughly 290 to 300 million years ago. When the modern Front Range pushed up in the late Cretaceous, those once-flat sediments were tilted onto the steep angles visible at Roxborough today, between about 50 and 60 degrees in places. The same formation surfaces north at Red Rocks and south at Garden of the Gods, but the Roxborough exposures sit cleanly against the open prairie with no road cut across them, which is one reason the park was protected as a National Natural Landmark in 1980.
Roxborough is one of the most tightly preserved state parks in Colorado. Bicycles, dogs, picnics, and rock climbing are all prohibited on the trails, and the gates close at dusk. The standard loop is the 2.3-mile Fountain Valley Trail, which runs along the base of the largest slabs. Carpenter Peak Trail is the longer option, climbing about 1,000 feet over roughly three miles to a summit near 7,200 feet with a wide view back across the hogbacks and out toward Pikes Peak on a clear day. A small day-use fee is collected at the entrance, and the visitor center keeps shortened hours through winter.