Smith River wild and scenic
— — a canyon you can only reach by boat.
Not only on a wall.
“Fifty-nine river miles through a limestone canyon between the Big Belt and Little Belt mountains, with one put-in at Camp Baker and one take-out at Eden Bridge and no road between them. The float takes most parties four or five days. The State of Montana runs a lottery each winter for the permits; most years more people apply than the river can carry. Walls rise several hundred feet above the boats, sometimes pale, sometimes the colour of wet bone, and the side creeks come in clear over gravel. — from the studio
Smith River wild and scenic, 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 Smith River rises in the Castle Mountains of Meagher County and runs about 200 kilometres north to its confluence with the Missouri near Ulm. The fifty-nine-mile section managed as Smith River State Park runs between Camp Baker and Eden Bridge through a deep limestone canyon, with no road access and no permanent settlement along the corridor. The canyon walls rise several hundred feet above the water, cut by side creeks like Tenderfoot and Sheep, and the float passes through a mix of state-park, Forest Service, and private land under a single permit system administered by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
The Smith is permit-only. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks runs a lottery each February; in a recent year roughly seven thousand applications competed for about nine hundred float permits, with launches limited to nine boats per day. Most parties take four to five days to cover the fifty-nine miles, camping at one of fifty-some designated boat-camps along the canyon. The float window runs roughly from late April through early July, depending on snowpack; lower flows in late summer leave too little water in the upper canyon to float at all.
There is no cell service in the canyon and no road for the length of the corridor. Many floaters describe the Smith as the quietest piece of country in central Montana — five days between Camp Baker and Eden Bridge with no engines, no town lights, and no traffic noise. The river holds brown and rainbow trout, and golden eagles nest in the cliffs above Tenderfoot Creek. The reach below Indian Springs is one of the few stretches where Lewis and Clark, who reached the mouth in 1805, did not travel; their canoes turned up the Missouri instead.