Makoshika State Park badlands (Glendive)
— — the bones the prairie wears on the outside.
Not only on a wall.
“The badlands the Lakota called makoshika, the bad earth. Pine and juniper hold the rims; the sandstone falls away in pink and grey sheets toward the Yellowstone River. Hadrosaur ribs and the odd Tyrannosaurus tooth still wash out of the Hell Creek beds after a hard rain. The drive in from Glendive is short, the silence at the trailheads long. Coyotes work the draws at dusk, and the wind does most of the talking. from the studio
Makoshika State Park badlands (Glendive), 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.
Makoshika is the largest of Montana's state parks, just over 11,500 acres on the southern edge of Glendive in Dawson County. The name comes from a Lakota phrase meaning bad earth or bad land. The exposed rock is the Hell Creek Formation, the same Late Cretaceous layer that runs across the northern plains and yields some of the most studied dinosaur fossils in North America. Pine, juniper, and yucca hold the higher ground above eroded sandstone, siltstone, and bentonite clays cut by the Yellowstone River drainage to the north.
The visible layers are Late Cretaceous, roughly 65 to 70 million years old, capped in places by younger Fort Union sediments. Hadrosaur, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaurus rex material has been collected from the park and the surrounding Hell Creek beds since the early twentieth century, including specimens that passed through the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. Bentonite, a clay formed from old volcanic ash, swells when wet and slumps when dry, which is why the slopes keep eroding into the soft ridges and hoodoos that give the park its silhouette.
The park entrance sits about two miles south of downtown Glendive, off Snyder Avenue, and stays open year round, with the visitor center seasonal. A short paved drive climbs to viewpoints at Cap Rock and the Diane Gabriel Trail; gravel side roads can turn impassable after rain because of the bentonite. Glendive itself is on Interstate 94, about 220 miles east of Billings and 35 miles from the North Dakota line. Best light is the hour after sunrise from the eastern rims, when the pink in the sandstone reads warmest.