Beaver dam Adirondacks
— the pond a beaver built last winter.
Not only on a wall.
“Beavers have been remaking the Adirondacks longer than the state had a name for them. A dam goes up across a quiet outlet, the woods flood, a meadow opens, the herons arrive. North Country guides still read a fresh lodge the way other people read a weather report. The work is patient. The work is everywhere.
Beaver dam Adirondacks, 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.
Adirondack Park covers about six million acres in northern New York, the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, established by the New York State legislature in 1892. The 'forever wild' clause of Article XIV of the state constitution, ratified in 1894, keeps the state-owned forest preserve inside the Blue Line uncut. The park holds more than 3,000 lakes and ponds and 30,000 miles of rivers and streams, a watershed shaped over centuries by the work of beavers as much as by glaciers.
The American beaver, Castor canadensis, is a keystone species in the Adirondacks. A single colony will fell aspen and birch through a winter and raise a stick-and-mud dam that backs an outlet stream up by a foot or two, sometimes more. The flooded ground becomes wet meadow, then alder swale, then a pond ringed with cattails. New York's beaver population, near extinction by 1900, has rebuilt past 50,000 thanks to trapping limits and habitat protection inside the park.
Sound carries strangely across a beaver pond. The slap of a tail on still water at dusk is the local thunderclap, and a wood duck's whistle reads loud against it. Bull moose, returned to the region since the 1980s and now numbering near a thousand by NYSDEC counts, browse the pond edges at first light. There are stretches inside the High Peaks Wilderness where the nearest paved road is more than ten miles away, and the dam is the only structure for sound to bounce off.