Sweetgrass Hills lone buttes
— — three islands the prairie left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“Three buttes on a sea of wheat and grass, lifting suddenly out of a horizon that otherwise runs flat for a hundred miles. West Butte, Gold Butte, East Butte — visible from the Sweet Grass border crossing and from most of Hi-Line Highway 2. The Blackfeet call the range Katoyissiks. Ranchers a county away use it to navigate. From the studio, it is the shape of distance itself: a place you find by looking up from the road. from the studio
Sweetgrass Hills lone buttes, 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 Sweet Grass Hills are three isolated buttes — West Butte, Gold Butte, and East Butte — rising from the Montana plains about ten miles south of the Canadian border. East Butte tops out at roughly 6,983 feet (2,128 metres), nearly 3,000 feet above the surrounding prairie. Geologists trace them to igneous intrusions from the late Eocene, harder than the sedimentary plains that eroded around them. The hills sit across Liberty, Toole, and Hill Counties, visible for over a hundred miles in clear air, and have long held cultural and ceremonial importance to the Blackfeet Nation.
There is no town on the buttes. The closest settlements are Sunburst, Whitlash, and Chester, each small enough to drive through without slowing. US Highway 2, the Hi-Line, runs about thirty miles south. Nearer in, gravel county roads thread between wheat sections and cattle ground. Light pollution is among the lowest in the lower forty-eight, and the buttes serve as a navigational mark for ranchers and long-haul drivers crossing the Sweet Grass port of entry into Alberta. The quiet here is the working quiet of a wheat country that has not yet been discovered as scenic.
Weather on the hills runs harder than the prairie below. Winter chinooks can lift temperatures forty degrees in an afternoon, then drop them again overnight. Summer light here is long: at 49 degrees north, late June dusk holds past ten o'clock. The buttes catch their own weather — a single thunderhead will sit over Gold Butte while the plains stay clear. From thirty miles out the hills appear blue, then grey, then green as the road closes the distance. The Milk River drains the country to the south, the South Saskatchewan to the north.