Sprague Lake reflection Rocky Mountain National Park Ceramic Art Tile
— — the mountain twice, while the wind is still asleep.
Not only on a wall.
“A shallow lake just off the Bear Lake Road, half a mile around on the boardwalk loop. Abner Sprague built it in the early 1900s by damming Glacier Creek behind his lodge, and the water held the mountain so well that the dude-ranch guests kept coming back. On a still morning before the wind picks up, the surface holds Hallett Peak and Flattop and the whole eastern wall of the Continental Divide a second time. That doubled range draws photographers up the road from Estes Park while it is still dark.
Sprague Lake reflection 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.
Sprague Lake sits at 8,688 feet on the east side of Rocky Mountain National Park, about ten miles up the Bear Lake Road from the town of Estes Park, Colorado. The lake is small and shallow, around thirteen acres with a maximum depth of about twelve feet, formed in the early 1900s when the homesteader Abner E. Sprague dammed Glacier Creek behind the lodge he ran for fishing and touring guests. The park boundary closed around it in 1915. A half-mile boardwalk loops the shoreline, level enough that wheelchairs travel it, and the northeastern rim opens onto the Continental Divide, with Hallett Peak, Flattop Mountain, Notchtop, and Otis above the water.
The lake is photographed most often at first light, before the wind comes up over the divide and breaks the surface. On a calm morning the reflection of Hallett Peak, Flattop, and the rest of the eastern wall lands clean on the water, with the snowfield and the ridgeline doubled almost line for line. Photographers and guides drive up the Bear Lake Road in the dark to be set up on the eastern shore by the time the alpenglow hits, somewhere around twenty minutes before sunrise depending on the month. By mid-morning the wind shifts and the mountains break up; by ten the lake is a different lake.
The trailhead sits at the Sprague Lake parking lot off Bear Lake Road, about six miles from the Beaver Meadows entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. The loop is half a mile, gains thirty-six feet, and takes most walkers about thirty minutes including the time spent on the small footbridges that cross the marshy west end of the lake. The trail surface is hard-packed gravel, wheelchair-accessible, and remains one of the few in the park that can be walked at altitude without trekking poles or a permit. A park pass is required to enter; the Bear Lake Road corridor uses a timed-entry permit through the summer season.