The Flume Gorge is a narrow slot canyon with vertical granite walls and a wooden boardwalk threading the bottom
— — the walls close in, the boardwalk keeps going.
Not only on a wall.
“Two granite walls, twelve feet apart in the tight places, ninety feet straight up. A wooden boardwalk runs the floor of the slot, bolted to the rock above the brook. The light shifts as you walk: full sun at the entrance, deep green-grey halfway in, the bright white of Avalanche Falls at the far end. Mosses and ferns hold to the seams where the spray reaches. The slot is colder than the trail above it. from the studio
The Flume Gorge is a narrow slot canyon with vertical granite walls and a wooden boardwalk threading the bottom, 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 Flume Gorge is a natural slot at the base of Mount Liberty, in Franconia Notch State Park in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The chasm runs roughly 800 feet long, with vertical walls of Conway granite rising 70 to 90 feet and standing 12 to 20 feet apart at the floor. A bolted wooden boardwalk threads the length of the slot above the Flume Brook. The gorge was found in 1808 by Jess Guernsey, a 93-year-old local woman, while she was fishing. It has been one of the most visited natural sites in New England since the 1840s.
The walls are Conway granite, a coarse-grained pink-grey rock that formed during the Jurassic, part of the White Mountain Magma Series. The slot itself follows a near-vertical fracture in the pluton, widened over thousands of years by the Flume Brook scouring its bed and prying loose blocks of the wall. The cleavage is so clean that the two faces read as cut by hand. Mosses and rock ferns hold to the wetter seams where spray off Avalanche Falls keeps the rock damp through the summer.
The boardwalk runs on a posted season, typically early May through late October, with timed tickets from the visitor center on Route 3 in Lincoln. The full loop is about two miles with roughly 500 feet of climb: covered bridge, slot, Avalanche Falls at the head, then a forest descent past the Sentinel Pine Bridge and the Pool. Allow ninety minutes. The boardwalk is closed and removed for the winter; the gorge itself remains, walkable in microspikes for those who know what they are doing.