Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness alpine
— the granite the snow never quite leaves.
Not only on a wall.
“A long curve of granite peaks above the upper Bitterroot, drawn along the Continental Divide between Philipsburg and Wisdom. The Anaconda Range carries snow into July most years, and the cirque lakes below West Goat Peak hold a cold that the calendar doesn't change. The trails are quiet. People who know it tend to keep knowing it.
Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness alpine, 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.
The Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness covers about 158,000 acres across the Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Bitterroot National Forests, straddling the Continental Divide in southwest Montana between Philipsburg and Wisdom. Congress designated it in 1964 as one of the original units under the Wilderness Act. The Anaconda Range runs through its core, with West Goat Peak rising to 10,793 feet as the high point. More than 280 miles of trail thread the basins, and roughly forty alpine lakes sit in glacial cirques along the spine.
The wilderness sees a fraction of the traffic of the nearby Bob Marshall or Glacier country. Annual visitation runs in the low thousands, spread across an area roughly the size of Chicago. Trailheads like Storm Lake and East Fork Reservoir hold a handful of trucks on a summer Saturday. The Nez Perce passed through these mountains during the 1877 flight, crossing the divide near Gibbons Pass to the south. The country has kept much of that older quietness.
High passes typically clear by mid-July and snow returns by October. Pintler Pass at 8,742 feet is the classic crossing, linking Johnson Lake on the east side to the Middle Fork of Rock Creek on the west. Wildflowers in the cirque basins peak in late July: glacier lily, paintbrush, beargrass. Cutthroat trout hold in the upper lakes. Hunting season opens in early September, and the country shifts character once the larch turn gold along the lower foothills below Storm Lake.