Steamboat Springs at sunset Yampa Valley Ceramic Art Tile
— a valley the light takes its time leaving.
Not only on a wall.
“A ski town on the floor of a wide valley in northwest Colorado, with the Yampa River drawing a long line through it. The Park Range stands to the east; the Flat Tops Wilderness lies to the southwest. Locals call it Ski Town USA. More than ninety winter Olympians have come from these mountains. In summer the valley is hay meadows and cattle; in winter the snow falls light and dry, the kind they trademarked as Champagne Powder. The sunset is slow here. The valley is wide enough that the last light has to cross all of it before the cold blue comes in.
Steamboat Springs at sunset Yampa Valley 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.
Steamboat Springs sits on the floor of the Yampa Valley in Routt County, northwest Colorado, at about 6,732 feet (2,052 metres) above sea level. The Park Range rises to the east; the Flat Tops Wilderness lies to the southwest. The town takes its name from the chain of natural hot springs along the Yampa River. Early French trappers said the sound of one spring carried like the chug of a steamboat engine. James Crawford founded the town in 1875 on land long used by the Yampatika band of the Ute. The Yampa, one of the last largely undammed rivers in the Colorado system, cuts through the valley floor and runs west toward Dinosaur.
The Yampa Valley runs roughly northwest to southeast, broad and open, which gives the late light a long throw. The Sleeping Giant, marked Elk Mountain on the topographic maps, sits at the north end of town and is usually the last feature to lose colour. In winter, when the sun drops behind the Park Range, alpenglow holds on the snowfields of Mount Werner (10,568 feet / 3,221 metres) for several minutes after the valley floor has gone blue. In late summer the hay fields below catch a brief gold before the shadow of the ridge reaches them. The colour change is slow because the basin is wide.
The Yampa River is the through-line of the valley and one of the last largely free-flowing rivers in the Colorado River system. There are no large dams between its headwaters in the Flat Tops and its junction with the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, a stretch that preserves a natural spring-flood pulse most western rivers have lost. Cottonwoods line the banks where the water passes through downtown. Steamboat takes its name not from the river itself but from the seven major hot springs along the valley floor; Strawberry Park Hot Springs sits about seven miles north of town in a small canyon. In drought years the late-summer flow is thin enough to wade.