Glen Boulder Pinkham Notch
— — the rock the ice forgot to take with it.
Not only on a wall.
“A glacial erratic the size of a small house, balanced on a ledge of Slide Peak above the Notch. The Wisconsin ice sheet carried it here and then withdrew, leaving the boulder where it sits. The Glen Boulder Trail climbs to it from the Route 16 wayside, a steep mile and a half through spruce and open ledge. From the boulder, the Carter Range opens to the east. — from the studio
Glen Boulder Pinkham Notch, 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.
Glen Boulder sits on the south shoulder of Slide Peak in Pinkham Notch, the deep valley between Mount Washington and the Carter-Moriah Range in New Hampshire's White Mountains. It is a glacial erratic, left behind when the Wisconsin ice sheet retreated roughly 14,000 years ago. The Glen Boulder Trail leaves Route 16 at the Glen Ellis Falls wayside and climbs about 1.6 miles to the boulder, gaining around 1,700 feet through spruce-fir forest before breaking onto open ledge near 3,700 feet.
The boulder is granite, perched at an angle that looks improbable from Route 16 below. It was plucked from a higher slope by the continental ice sheet and set down on its current ledge as the ice thinned. Geologists call this kind of feature a perched erratic. Similar erratics sit on Madison and across the Presidential Range, but Glen Boulder is the visible one — large enough to read from the valley floor and reachable on foot in an afternoon from the Pinkham Notch Visitor Center, which sits about a mile north along Route 16.
The trailhead is the Glen Ellis Falls parking area on the west side of Route 16, about eight miles north of Jackson. The climb is short but steep, and the upper ledge is exposed to weather coming off Mount Washington — conditions can shift quickly even in summer. Most parties turn around at the boulder; the trail continues up to the Davis Path and the Gulf of Slides. The White Mountain National Forest requires a recreation pass at the wayside. The trail is typically clear from late May through October.