Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge pothole lakes
— — the water the glacier forgot.
Not only on a wall.
“A scatter of small lakes left behind when the ice sheet retreated, holding the sky between the Mission Mountains and Highway 93. In spring the potholes fill with tundra swans, redheads, ruddy ducks. The Missions stand white above the cattails. The road moves through; the water stays. — from the studio
Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge pothole lakes, 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.
Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge sits in the Mission Valley of western Montana, between Ronan and Charlo along U.S. Highway 93, on land within the Flathead Indian Reservation. The refuge was established in 1921 and covers roughly 2,062 acres of native bunchgrass prairie wrapped around a reservoir and a constellation of glacial pothole lakes left by the retreat of the Cordilleran ice sheet. The Mission Mountains rise to the east; the Salish name for the range is Cilⱡtm̓iyétkʷ. The refuge is co-managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
The pothole lakes are not man-made. They are kettle ponds, formed when blocks of ice broke off the receding glacier roughly 12,000 years ago and melted into depressions in the till. There are more than 800 such potholes inside the refuge boundary, ranging from a few square metres to several acres. Most are shallow, fringed with hardstem bulrush and cattail, and warm quickly in spring. The reservoir at the centre, completed in 1921, holds the larger body of water that gives the refuge its anchor.
Spring and fall are the loud seasons here. The Pacific Flyway passes directly overhead, and in late March the potholes carry tundra swans, snow geese, redheads, ruddy ducks, ring-necked ducks, and the occasional sandhill crane staging on the prairie. Ninepipe is a designated Globally Important Bird Area. Summer is quieter, the water lower, the grasses bleaching toward gold. By November the surface lakes ice over and the cycle resets. The auto tour route is closed during the nesting season, March through mid-July, to protect colonial waterbirds.