Missouri Breaks Wild and Scenic River
— — a river still keeping its own counsel.
Not only on a wall.
“One hundred forty-nine miles of the Upper Missouri, unchanged in any meaningful way since Lewis and Clark poled up it in May of 1805. White sandstone cliffs, badlands, cottonwood bottoms, no roads for long stretches. The canoe traffic peaks in June and the river holds its own quiet by mid-September. — from the studio
Missouri Breaks Wild and Scenic River, 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 Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River runs 149 miles from Fort Benton, Montana, to the Fred Robinson Bridge at the upstream end of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. Congress designated the corridor in 1976 under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and President Clinton expanded the surrounding protection in 2001 by establishing the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, 377,000 acres administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The river drops gently across the high plains of north-central Montana, accessible mainly by canoe.
The White Cliffs section between Coal Banks Landing and Judith Landing exposes the Eagle Sandstone, a Late Cretaceous formation roughly eighty million years old, weathering into the towers, columns, and arches that Meriwether Lewis described on May 31, 1805 as scenes of visionary enchantment. Citadel Rock, an igneous intrusion of dark shonkinite breaking through the pale cliffs, stands above river mile sixty-two. Hole-in-the-Wall, an arched opening high on the south bank, sits a few miles downstream. The cliffs continue to slough into the river each spring.
Outside the put-in at Coal Banks Landing and the takeouts at Judith Landing and Kipp Recreation Area, there are no towns, no bridges, and almost no road access along the protected corridor. Cell service drops within an hour of Fort Benton. Most floaters take five to seven days for the full White Cliffs run; the river averages between three and four miles per hour through summer. After Labor Day the put-ins go nearly empty and the bull elk start to bugle in the bottoms.