Sluice Boxes State Park
— — a railroad bed the creek took back.
Not only on a wall.
“A narrow canyon south of the small town of Belt, where Belt Creek cuts through limestone walls and the old Great Northern grade still lies along the water. The state park is primitive — no campground, no signage past the trailhead, just the creek and the rock and the cottonwoods. People come for the trout, for the cliffs, and for the few standing walls of the coal camps that worked this canyon a century ago. The water runs clear in summer and brown in the runoff weeks of June. — from the studio
Sluice Boxes State Park, 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.
Sluice Boxes State Park follows roughly eight miles of Belt Creek through a steep limestone canyon in the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana, in Cascade County south of the town of Belt. The park is undeveloped: a single trailhead off U.S. Highway 89 leads to the old Great Northern Railway grade, abandoned in the 1940s, which now serves as a rough footpath along the creek. The canyon walls rise several hundred feet above the water, and old timbers, foundations, and a few standing stone walls remain from the coal camps that operated here in the late nineteenth century.
Belt Creek is a blue-ribbon trout stream by reputation, fed by springs in the Little Belts and carrying browns and rainbows through the canyon. Anglers wade the lower mile from the trailhead in late summer when flows drop and the water clears; the canyon is closed to wading and floating during the high runoff weeks of late May and June, when the creek can rise several feet in a day. The stream eventually joins the Missouri River near Great Falls, draining the eastern slope of the Little Belt range.
There is no campground, no drinking water, and no fee. The park lists the trail as primitive and warns that the route requires several creek crossings and stretches of scrambling over washed-out grade. Most visitors walk the first mile or two from the Logging Creek trailhead and turn back. The southern access at Riceville Bridge is gated seasonally. Cell service drops near the canyon mouth. Mountain lions and rattlesnakes are noted in the park's own materials; the canyon is best in September when the cottonwoods turn.