Charles M Russell National Wildlife Refuge breaks
— — the country the river carved and then left alone.
Not only on a wall.
“The Missouri River cuts a 125-mile run through the badland country of central Montana, walled on both sides by sandstone bluffs the locals call the breaks. The refuge wraps 1.1 million acres of that ground. Elk move in the coulees at dawn. Bighorn sheep work the cliffs. There is no through road. Most of it has not changed since Lewis and Clark passed through in 1805.
Charles M Russell National Wildlife Refuge breaks, 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 Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge wraps roughly 1.1 million acres along 125 miles of the Missouri River in central Montana, from Fort Peck Dam upriver into Fergus County. It was established in 1936 and is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The terrain is broken sandstone bluffs, sage flats, and cottonwood bottoms — the country Lewis and Clark described in 1805. The refuge adjoins the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument to the west, together protecting one of the largest blocks of unfragmented prairie left on the continent.
There is no through road across the refuge. Access is by gravel from Highway 191 near Fort Peck, by boat on the Missouri, or by long two-track tracks that go nowhere fast. Cell signal is rare. The nearest towns — Jordan, Malta, Lewistown — are an hour or more out. The wind carries a long way on prairie this open. Most visitors hear nothing human for an entire afternoon, which is part of why the painter Charles Russell loved this country and why the refuge still bears his name.
Spring brings the elk down out of the river bottoms and the prairie blooms hard for about three weeks in May. Summer is hot and dry; thunderstorms build over the breaks most afternoons in July. Fall is the most photographed season — September cottonwoods along the Missouri turn yellow and the bighorn rut starts in November. Winter closes most of the interior roads; the refuge becomes a place for ice anglers on Fort Peck Reservoir and for a small population of wintering bald eagles.