Jefferson River canyon
— — the river that taught Lewis to wait.
Not only on a wall.
“The Jefferson runs slow here, between limestone walls the LaHood road has hugged for a century. One of three forks that meet at Three Forks to make the Missouri. Cottonwoods turn early. Trout hold in the slack water under the cliff line. The canyon keeps its own weather, drier and warmer than the valley a mile away.
Jefferson River canyon, 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 Jefferson River runs about 83 miles from Twin Bridges, where the Beaverhead and Big Hole join, to Three Forks, where it meets the Madison and Gallatin to form the Missouri. The canyon section between Cardwell and LaHood cuts through Madison Group limestone uplifted along the Tobacco Root range. Interstate 90 and the old Lewis and Clark Trail share the corridor; the Lewis and Clark Caverns sit above the south wall. The river drains roughly 9,500 square miles of southwest Montana before it joins the other two forks.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks classifies stretches of the Jefferson as blue-ribbon trout water, holding brown and rainbow trout in the slower pools beneath the cliff line. Flows drop sharply by August in low-snowpack years; the upper river above Twin Bridges runs warm and the state has issued hoot-owl closures in some recent summers. The canyon water is glassy and slow where the road bends close to the rock, faster where the river cuts away from the limestone. Cottonwoods and willows hold the banks through the corridor.
The walls are Madison Group limestone, deposited in a shallow tropical sea about 340 million years ago and uplifted as the Tobacco Root and surrounding ranges rose along the western edge of the canyon. The same limestone hosts Lewis and Clark Caverns, the cave system above the south wall that became Montana's first state park in 1937. The rock weathers to pale grey and rust where iron stains the seeps. The river has been cutting this passage since at least the late Pleistocene.