Mount Monadnock
— — the mountain that stands by itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A bare granite summit visible for a hundred miles in every direction. Monadnock stands alone above southwest New Hampshire, the rest of the range worn down around it. Emerson climbed it. Thoreau camped on it twice. The trees give out below the top, and the last half mile is rock the wind has scoured for a thousand years. — from the studio
Mount Monadnock, 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.
Mount Monadnock rises to 3,165 feet in the towns of Jaffrey and Dublin, New Hampshire, about 60 miles northwest of Boston. The summit is bare granite, the result of fires set by farmers in the early 1800s to clear wolves and pasture; the thin soil never recovered. The mountain gave its name to a class of landform: a 'monadnock' is now any isolated peak that stands above an eroded plain. Trails from the Monadnock State Park headquarters in Jaffrey reach the summit in about two hours.
Above 2,500 feet the trees give out and the wind off the summit comes unfiltered. The bare granite holds heat through the afternoon and lets it go fast after sunset, so the air at the top runs ten or fifteen degrees colder than at the parking lot. On a clear day the view reaches all six New England states, with the Boston skyline visible 60 miles to the southeast. Cloud often hangs on the summit when the valleys below are clear, a quirk of an isolated peak rising into wetter air.
Monadnock State Park manages the main trailheads out of Jaffrey, with a per-person day-use fee. The White Dot Trail is the most direct route to the summit, two miles and about two thousand feet of gain. The mountain sees over 100,000 hikers a year, which puts it among the most-climbed peaks in the world. October weekends fill the lot by mid-morning; the foliage window runs from early to mid-month, with red maple lower down and bare granite holding the sky above.