Mount Washington summit is treeless tundra above 5,000 ft with rime ice in any non-summer season
— — the country above the last tree.
Not only on a wall.
“On Mount Washington the spruce gives out around 4,400 feet, and above 5,000 the mountain is arctic tundra: sedge, lichen, diapensia, krummholz crouched into the rock. For ten months a year the summit fog freezes on contact and rime ice grows into the wind, feathering every cairn and cable in the same direction. The Alpine Garden flowers for about six weeks. The rest of the year the colour is white on grey. — from the studio
Mount Washington summit is treeless tundra above 5,000 ft with rime ice in any non-summer season, 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 Washington tops out at 6,288 feet, the highest summit in the northeastern United States and the high point of the Presidential Range in the White Mountains. Treeline on the southern Presidentials sits near 4,900 feet; above it the mountain holds the largest area of alpine tundra in the eastern United States, roughly seven square miles across the range. The summit sits at the meeting point of three major storm tracks, which is the reason for its weather. The land is managed jointly by the State of New Hampshire and the U.S. Forest Service.
Mount Washington is famous for weather, not height. The summit observatory once recorded a surface wind of 231 miles per hour, on April 12, 1934, the highest measured anywhere on Earth until a 1996 typhoon reading from Barrow Island, Australia. The average annual temperature on the summit is about 27 degrees Fahrenheit, and the peak is in cloud roughly 60 percent of the year. Hurricane-force winds occur on more than 100 days annually, which is why the rime ice grows the way it does.
The alpine zone has roughly a six-week growing season. Diapensia, Lapland rosebay, and alpine azalea bloom in late June and early July across the Alpine Garden on the eastern flank, a fragile community of cushion plants that survives by hugging the granite. Rime ice begins forming on the summit by late September and persists through May; only July and August are reliably ice-free. The Cog Railway and the Auto Road close by late November and reopen, weather permitting, in late April.