Black Rock Desert
— — a flat that goes white to the horizon.
Not only on a wall.
“A thousand square miles of cracked alkali playa, the dry floor of a Pleistocene lake. The surface dries to a hard white crust that holds the sky in shallow puddles after rain. Thrust SSC broke the sound barrier here in 1997. Every August the city of Black Rock rises on the playa and disappears again. The rest of the year it belongs to wind and antelope.
Black Rock Desert, 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 Black Rock Desert is a high desert playa in northwestern Nevada, about 100 miles north of Reno in Humboldt and Pershing Counties. The dry lake bed covers roughly 1,000 square miles of cracked alkali flat at an elevation near 3,900 feet, the floor of ancient Lake Lahontan, which last filled at the close of the Pleistocene. The Bureau of Land Management administers the surrounding Black Rock Desert-High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area, established in 2000. The California Trail crossed here in the 1840s, following the Applegate cutoff toward the Sierra.
The playa is one of the largest, flattest, most acoustically muted places in the lower forty-eight states. Sound dies fast on the alkali crust. Outside the late-August Burning Man week, traffic is sparse, and on a still day the loudest thing is your own breathing. Pronghorn antelope, the fastest land mammal in North America, range across the surrounding sage. The closest town, Gerlach, has a population around 100. After dark the Bortle 1 sky reads stars all the way down to the horizon.
The playa floods every winter under a few inches of standing water, then dries through spring into the bone-hard summer surface. Late August through early September is the brief window when the crust holds vehicles, the temperatures drop into a wearable range, and Burning Man builds and tears down its 80,000-person ephemeral city. Thrust SSC broke the sound barrier here on October 15, 1997, becoming the first land vehicle to do so. October through February the playa returns to wind, rain, and small flocks of birds.