Glacier National Park
— — the crown of the continent, thinning.
Not only on a wall.
“A million acres of the northern Rockies where the watersheds of the Pacific, the Hudson Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico all begin. The Going-to-the-Sun Road climbs through it from McDonald to St. Mary, opening for a short season each summer once the avalanche chutes are cleared. Of the roughly 80 named glaciers present in 1850 about 25 remain. The Blackfeet call this country the Backbone of the World. Most days the light moves across it faster than weather can hold.
Glacier National Park, 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.
Glacier National Park covers 1,013,322 acres of the northern Rocky Mountains in northwest Montana, against the Canadian border. Congress established the park in 1910 as the tenth U.S. national park. In 1932 it joined Canada's Waterton Lakes to form the world's first International Peace Park, and UNESCO added the pair to its World Heritage list in 1995. The park contains over 700 lakes, 175 named mountains, and the headwaters of streams that flow to the Pacific, the Hudson Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico. The Blackfeet Nation borders it on the east and holds long ancestral ties to the range.
The Going-to-the-Sun Road, completed in 1933, traverses the park for 50 miles between West Glacier and St. Mary across Logan Pass at 6,646 feet. The alpine section above the Loop opens roughly between mid-June and mid-July once plow crews clear the Big Drift, often more than 80 feet of compacted snow, and closes again with the first heavy autumn storm. Wildflowers peak through July on the Logan Pass meadows; huckleberries ripen in August along the lower slopes; larch turn gold in late September on the western valleys.
Glacier counts among the most rapidly changing protected landscapes in the United States. A 2017 U.S. Geological Survey assessment found that of the roughly 80 named glaciers documented in 1850, about 26 still met the 25-acre threshold to be classified as active glaciers, and most had lost more than 60 percent of their surface area. Grinnell, Sperry, and Jackson are the most photographed and the most thinned. The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem still holds the southernmost population of inland grizzly bears in the lower 48.