Platte River
— — a mile wide, an inch deep, and full of cranes.
Not only on a wall.
“The Platte is the river the Oregon Trail followed across the plains, shallow enough in places that the old emigrant guidebooks called it a road. For six weeks each spring, about 80 percent of the world's sandhill cranes — close to a million birds — drop into a stretch near Kearney to feed on waste corn and roost overnight on the wet sandbars. The sound starts before sunrise and carries miles across the cottonwoods. The river is doing what it has done for ten thousand years, in front of anyone willing to stand still in the cold.
Platte River, 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 Platte River runs about 310 miles across Nebraska, formed at the city of North Platte where the North Platte and South Platte rivers meet, and emptying into the Missouri River just south of Omaha. The Lower Platte is famously broad and shallow — the source of the line, attributed to early travellers, that it is a mile wide and an inch deep. The river was the central corridor of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, with hundreds of thousands of emigrants following its north bank between 1841 and 1869.
Each year between late February and early April, roughly 80 percent of the world's sandhill cranes — about a million birds — converge on a 60-mile reach of the Central Platte between Grand Island and Kearney. The cranes spend the day in the surrounding cornfields and wet meadows building reserves for the flight north, then return at dusk to roost on the river's shallow sandbars where shifting current keeps predators at distance. The Rowe Sanctuary, run by the National Audubon Society since 1974, operates blinds along the river through the migration window.
The Platte is a braided, sand-bottomed prairie river with a wide flood-prone channel, historically up to a mile across in the central reach. That width is what made the sandbar roosts possible and what made the wagon trains use the north bank as their road — fords were many and shallow but quicksand was a constant hazard. Twentieth-century dams on the North and South Platte, and irrigation withdrawals across three states, have narrowed the channel; the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program has worked since 2007 to restore flow and habitat for the cranes and the federally protected whooping crane.