Devils Hole
— — a pool the desert keeps to itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A narrow flooded cavern in the Mojave, on the Nevada edge of Death Valley. The pool at the top is small, twenty-two metres long, framed by limestone the colour of bone. The water sits at thirty-three degrees and never moves. Below the surface the cave opens into an aquifer no diver has yet found the bottom of. A few hundred pupfish, found nowhere else on earth, live on a single shallow shelf.
Devils Hole, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Devils Hole is a geothermal cavern in the Amargosa Desert of Nye County, Nevada, set within the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and administered as a detached unit of Death Valley National Park. The surface pool measures roughly twenty-two by three and a half metres and opens into a flooded limestone fissure whose explored depth exceeds 130 metres without reaching the bottom. The site lies about 145 kilometres west of Las Vegas and is fenced off from public entry to protect a single endemic species.
The pool holds a constant temperature of about thirty-three degrees Celsius and dissolved oxygen low enough to kill most fish. Its water comes from a regional carbonate aquifer that surfaces only in the Ash Meadows oasis, after travelling underground for thousands of years from recharge zones in the Spring Mountains. A small shallow shelf at one end, no larger than a parking space, receives direct sunlight for only a few hours a day in spring. That shelf is where the algae grow and where the resident pupfish feed and spawn.
Public entry is not allowed. The cavern sits behind a tall security fence and a locked gate, with cameras installed after a 2016 incident in which intruders killed several pupfish. The Devils Hole pupfish population is counted twice a year by divers from the Park Service and partners, and has ranged from 35 to about 263 fish since records began in 1972. The Ash Meadows refuge visitor centre, fifteen kilometres west on Spring Meadows Road, interprets the site and houses other springs that are open to walk.