Half Dome
— the granite the glacier left standing.
Not only on a wall.
“The granite dome that closes the eastern end of Yosemite Valley. Sheer northwest face, rounded crown, almost nine thousand feet above sea level and about a mile of vertical relief above the valley floor. Ansel Adams photographed it; John Muir climbed it before there were cables. From Glacier Point at sunset the face lights up rose, then cools to slate.
Half Dome, 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.
Half Dome rises 8,839 feet above sea level at the east end of Yosemite Valley, in Yosemite National Park, California. The valley floor sits at about 4,000 feet, giving the dome roughly 4,800 feet of relief. The exposed rock is Half Dome Granodiorite, intruded about 87 million years ago. The northwest face is one of the largest cliff faces in North America, dropping more than 2,000 feet near-vertical. The dome was not bisected by a glacier (a common myth) — the missing face is jointing and exfoliation, with later glacial polishing of the base.
The stone is Half Dome Granodiorite, a coarse-grained intrusive rock with large potassium feldspar phenocrysts. It cooled deep underground in the late Cretaceous and was exhumed over tens of millions of years as the Sierra Nevada rose and the overlying rock eroded off. The rounded crown is exfoliation — pressure-release sheets peeling from the dome in onion-skin layers. The vertical northwest face follows a joint plane in the rock; Pleistocene glaciers in Tenaya Canyon plucked away the slabs below it and polished what was left.
The cable route to the summit is 14 to 16 miles round-trip from the valley floor, with about 4,800 feet of gain. The last 400 feet climb the slick rounded back of the dome between two steel cables anchored in the granite. The cables are up from late May to early October, weather permitting, and a permit is required — distributed by lottery through Recreation.gov. The route gets dangerous in any threat of lightning. Allow ten to twelve hours from Happy Isles.