Great Basin National Park
— — a mountain alone in a wide sky.
Not only on a wall.
“A small park around Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada, near the Utah line, holding ancient bristlecone pines, the marble passages of Lehman Caves, and one of the darkest skies left in the lower 48. The basin sits below; the peak stands almost two miles above it. Few cars on the road. The wind in the pines is older than the country.
Great Basin 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.
Great Basin National Park covers 77,180 acres in eastern Nevada, just west of the Utah border. Wheeler Peak rises to 13,065 feet, the second-highest summit in Nevada. The park was established in 1986 and protects a slice of the Great Basin Desert along with the alpine zone above it. Lehman Caves, the park's marble cave system, was set aside as a national monument in 1922 and folded into the park at its creation. The nearest town is Baker, population roughly 50, just outside the eastern entrance.
The dark sky over Great Basin is part of what the park protects. NPS designated it a Gold-tier International Dark Sky Park in 2016, one of the darkest in the lower 48. On a moonless night the Milky Way casts a soft shadow. The park's elevation, distance from highway corridors, and dry desert air all hold the sky clean. The Astronomy Festival each September draws telescopes from across the West. Even casual visitors at the Lower Lehman Creek pull-off see the band of the galaxy without a telescope.
The bristlecone pines at the foot of Wheeler Peak are the longest-living single organisms known, some over 4,000 years old. A specimen called Prometheus was cut here in 1964 and counted at nearly 4,900 rings, the oldest tree ever recorded by ring count; the rangers do not point to its stump. The living groves stand around 10,000 feet on the rocky cirque below the peak. They twist as the high wind shapes them. The trail to the grove from the Wheeler Peak Campground is just over a mile each way.