Mount Whitney
— — the wall the desert runs into.
Not only on a wall.
“The highest point in the lower forty-eight, seen first from the Alabama Hills where four hundred westerns were shot. The granite catches the morning an hour before the desert floor does. People train for a year to walk up it in a day, and most of them do not sleep the night before the lottery results come out. — from the studio
Mount Whitney, 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 Whitney rises to 14,505 feet on the crest of the Sierra Nevada, the highest summit in the contiguous United States. It sits on the boundary between Inyo National Forest and Sequoia National Park, about thirteen miles west of the town of Lone Pine, California. The standard route climbs the Mount Whitney Trail from Whitney Portal at 8,360 feet, twenty-two miles round trip with roughly 6,100 feet of elevation gain. A daily permit lottery, run by Inyo National Forest, controls foot traffic from May through November.
The peak is granodiorite, part of the Sierra Nevada batholith that crystallised roughly eighty-five million years ago and was lifted along the Sierra fault. The east face drops more than ten thousand feet to the Owens Valley in fourteen horizontal miles, one of the steepest escarpments in North America. The small stone shelter at the summit was built by the Smithsonian Institution in 1909 to house lightning researchers, and still stands. It now serves as emergency cover for hikers caught in afternoon storms.
First light strikes the summit roughly an hour before it reaches the floor of the Owens Valley, about four thousand metres below. Climbers leaving Whitney Portal before three in the morning often time the route to put them at Trail Crest by sunrise, when the east face turns the colour of weak tea, then orange, then white. The Alabama Hills below have stood in for the Sierra in over four hundred Hollywood films, many of them filmed at the same hour for the same light.