Winter Park Mary Jane bowls Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— — the bowl the wind keeps filling.
Not only on a wall.
“Mary Jane is the eastern side of Winter Park Resort, the part that built its reputation on bumps. Above the moguls the trees give out and the bowls open. Parsenn Bowl crowns at 12,060 feet, right on the Continental Divide. Wind reloads the snow overnight, so the first chair off the Panoramic Express finds a face the late chair won't. Below, the moguls keep doing what moguls do. The bowls stay quiet about it.
Winter Park Mary Jane bowls 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.
Mary Jane is the eastern base area of Winter Park Resort, in Grand County, Colorado, about 67 miles northwest of Denver via Interstate 70 and U.S. Highway 40 over Berthoud Pass. The base sits at 9,450 feet (2,880 m); the Panoramic Express six-pack lift carries skiers to the top of Parsenn Bowl at 12,060 feet (3,676 m), one of the higher lift-served points in Colorado. The mountain opened in 1975 as the steeper, mogul-heavy expansion of Winter Park, which the City and County of Denver built in 1939. The resort operates inside the Arapaho National Forest. Alterra Mountain Company has run the property since 2018.
At Parsenn Bowl the trees give out. Colorado's timberline runs near 11,500 feet here, and the bowl crowns above it. The air is the dry continental air of the Colorado Rockies: thin, cold, often clear. Snowfall at Winter Park averages about 327 inches a year, much of it light and dry, blown and reorganised by the wind that runs along the Continental Divide. Storms move in from the west and unload on the upper bowls before the bumps below ever see them. On a settled morning the view east takes in James Peak at 13,294 feet and the Indian Peaks Wilderness; on a windy one the view is the inside of the storm.
Winter Park typically opens in mid-November and runs into late April, one of the longer seasons in Colorado thanks to the elevation and to snowmaking on the lower base. The Mary Jane side usually opens a week or two after the Winter Park side, once the bumps fill in. Parsenn Bowl and the high-alpine terrain open later, on the patrol's call, after the snowpack settles and the cornices stabilise. The bowl can ski into early spring when the lower mountain is already slushing out. Locals time their last weeks for the high terrain, when the days are long, the snow corn-cycles in the afternoon, and the lift line on the front side is mostly gone.