Saint Mary Peak Mission Range
— — a wall the reservation keeps to itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A high summit deep in the Mission Mountains of western Montana, above Saint Mary Lake. The peak sits along a ridge that divides the Mission Mountains Wilderness on the Flathead National Forest side from the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness held by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The country is steep and quiet. Most visitors photograph the range from the valley and let the peak keep its distance.
Saint Mary Peak Mission Range, 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.
Saint Mary Peak rises along the spine of the Mission Mountains in western Montana, east of the town of Saint Ignatius and north of Missoula. The range is split along its crest between two protected areas: the Mission Mountains Wilderness, managed by the Flathead National Forest on the east, and the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness, the first tribally designated wilderness in the United States, held by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on the west. The peak looks down on Saint Mary Lake, one of several cirque lakes carved into the granite walls of the upper range.
The Mission Range is built largely of Proterozoic Belt Supergroup rock, including argillites, quartzites, and siltites well over a billion years old, uplifted along the Mission fault and sharpened by Pleistocene ice. The east face is a near-vertical wall above the Swan Valley, while the west drops in tiers of cirques and lakes toward the Flathead. The lake basins were scoured by glaciers and now hold water clear enough to read the streambed in early summer. The rock breaks blocky and pale and lights up cold pink at last sun.
The Mission Range is one of the quieter high places in Montana. On the reservation side, the Tribal Wilderness closes a large area above the 4,500-foot contour around McDonald Peak from mid-July through October each year to protect grizzly bear habitat, and tribal recreation permits are required of non-members for use of reservation lands. The Forest Service wilderness on the east carries far less trail traffic than Glacier or the Beartooths. The result is country that holds itself. Most visitors content themselves with the view from the Mission Valley floor.