Medicine Rocks State Park sandstone
— — wind, given a hundred centuries to carve sandstone.
Not only on a wall.
“A scatter of soft sandstone pillars in the short-grass prairie east of Ekalaka. The Cheyenne and Sioux called these rocks sacred long before homesteaders arrived. Theodore Roosevelt rode through in 1883 and called it some of the most fantastic country he had ever seen. The wind keeps working. — from the studio
Medicine Rocks State Park sandstone, 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.
Medicine Rocks State Park sits in Carter County, about eleven miles north of Ekalaka and twenty-five miles south of Baker, on the rolling prairie of southeastern Montana. The park protects roughly 320 acres of pale, wind-carved sandstone pillars rising abruptly from the short-grass plains. Northern Plains tribes including the Northern Cheyenne and Lakota gathered here for ceremony and called the place Inyan-oka-la-ka, rocks with a hole in them. Theodore Roosevelt rode through in 1883 during his Dakota ranching years and recorded the formations in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.
The rock is a soft Tertiary sandstone, deposited some thirty to sixty million years ago when this part of Montana lay under shifting river channels and floodplains. Iron oxide and uneven cementing left the formation full of holes, hoodoos, and undercut shelves the wind continues to enlarge. Cliff swallows and prairie falcons nest in the cavities, and mule deer drift among the pillars at dusk. Climbing is prohibited because the stone is too friable to take a hold, and rangers ask visitors to keep off the formations entirely.
Medicine Rocks is one of the quietest state parks in Montana. Annual visitation runs well under twenty thousand, and the campground holds only twelve primitive sites with no electric hookups. The nearest town, Ekalaka, has a population around three hundred and sits eleven miles to the south. At night the dark sky lets the Milky Way print clean across the prairie, and meadowlarks are the loudest thing you hear at dawn. The wind, when it comes, takes the rocks for itself.