Lake McDonald with red shoreline pebbles
— — a beach the colour of old brick.
Not only on a wall.
“The pebbles along the shore are red, rose, plum, and pale green. They are argillite and siltite from the Belt Supergroup, a billion-year-old seabed lifted into the Rockies and tumbled smooth by the lake. The water is clear enough that the colour reads down to about ten feet. Stand long enough and the whole beach starts to look like it is glowing under the surface. — from the studio
Lake McDonald with red shoreline pebbles, 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.
Lake McDonald is the largest lake in Glacier National Park, about ten miles long, a mile and a half wide, and 472 feet deep, occupying a glacially carved trough on the west side of the Continental Divide. It sits at roughly 3,153 feet of elevation in northwest Montana's Flathead County. The lake is fed by snowmelt and small streams off the high country and drains west through McDonald Creek into the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Apgar Village sits at the southwest foot of the lake, Lake McDonald Lodge stands partway up the southwest shore.
The pebbles read in shades of red, rose, plum, maroon, and pale green. They are argillite and siltite from the Belt Supergroup, a sequence of sedimentary rocks laid down on an ancient seabed roughly 1.4 billion years ago and later lifted into the Rocky Mountains. The red and purple stones contain oxidised iron, the green stones contain reduced iron. The lake's water is exceptionally clear, with low nutrient and sediment levels, so light reaches the stones and the colour reads upward through several feet of water.
The shoreline is most easily reached from Apgar Beach at the southwest foot of the lake, where parking and a wide gravel beach are open through the warm months. Going-to-the-Sun Road runs along the southwest shore past Lake McDonald Lodge. The Park Service asks visitors to look at the pebbles, photograph them, and leave them in place; collecting stones inside the park is prohibited. The water stays cold all summer, rarely warming above the mid-fifties Fahrenheit, even when the air at lake level is in the eighties.