Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— the pink granite the evening turns purple.
Not only on a wall.
“Pikes Peak rises 8,000 feet above Colorado Springs in a single move. Granite and snow on the western horizon, the high plains running east to Kansas. Katharine Lee Bates wrote 'America the Beautiful' after reaching the summit in 1893; the Ute had long called the mountain Tava, the Sun Mountain. The cog railway has carried passengers from Manitou Springs to the top since 1891, rebuilt and back in service since 2021. From the city the mountain reads as a wall: pink granite at midday, the colour deepening through the long Colorado evening, gone again before sunrise.
Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak 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.
Colorado Springs sits at 6,035 feet at the eastern foot of Pikes Peak, in El Paso County, the second largest city in Colorado after Denver. The city was founded in 1871 by Civil War general William Jackson Palmer, growing along the Denver and Rio Grande Railway and the early-twentieth-century resort economy that drew tuberculosis patients to nearby Manitou Springs. Pikes Peak rises 8,000 feet above the city to a summit of 14,115 feet, one of fifty-eight Colorado fourteeners and the easternmost of the high Front Range. The Pikes Peak Highway runs 19 paved miles from Cascade to the summit; the Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway covers the same vertical from a different valley.
Pikes Peak granite is the geological signature of the southern Front Range. The pluton crystallised about 1.08 billion years ago, a coarse-grained pink rock named for the mountain it builds. The colour comes from potassium feldspar, the same mineral that gives Sweden's Bohus granite its rose tone. The red cliffs of Garden of the Gods, a few miles east of the peak, are a younger and different rock: 290-million-year-old Lyons sandstone, tipped vertical by the uplift that pushed the Front Range out of the plains. The peak itself, the talus along its high slopes, and the Cathedral Spires above the city are the older granite, and it is the rock that gives the mountain its specific colour at evening.
There are three ways to the summit. The Pikes Peak Highway, a 19-mile toll road from Cascade west of Colorado Springs, climbs from 7,400 feet to 14,115 feet on a timed-entry reservation system from mid-May through September. The Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway runs 8.9 miles from Manitou Springs to the top, the highest cog railway in the world; the line shut for a full rebuild in 2017 and reopened in May 2021. The third way is Barr Trail, the foot route, about 13 miles and roughly 7,500 vertical feet, with Barr Camp at the halfway mark as a shelter that stays open through the winter. The Summit Visitor Center opened in 2021, replacing a building that had stood since 1964.