Tug Hill Plateau snow country
— — the part of New York the lake snows under every winter.
Not only on a wall.
“A high broad plateau east of Lake Ontario, sparsely settled, mostly forest and dairy farm. The wind comes off the lake warm and wet and meets the rising ground, and the snow falls in quantities the rest of New York does not believe. Towns like Redfield and Hooker keep snowmobile trails open most of the winter. Barbed-wire fences disappear by Christmas. The plateau is quiet in a way the Adirondacks are not, because there are simply fewer roads. The snow does the talking. from the studio
Tug Hill Plateau snow country, 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 Tug Hill Plateau is an upland region in northern New York, covering roughly 2,100 square miles across parts of Lewis, Oswego, Jefferson, and Oneida counties. It rises east of Lake Ontario to a high point near Sears Pond at about 2,100 feet, with most of the plateau between 1,500 and 2,000 feet. The area is sparsely populated — fewer than a hundred residents per square mile across much of it — and largely covered in northern hardwood and conifer forest, with dairy farms on the western edge.
Tug Hill records the heaviest lake-effect snowfall east of the Rockies. The hamlet of Hooker, in the town of Redfield, has averaged more than 250 inches of snow a season; in 1976–77 the area received over 460 inches. The mechanism is direct: cold Canadian air crosses the relatively warm open water of Lake Ontario, picks up moisture, and is forced to rise over the plateau, where the moisture falls out as snow. The heaviest single storms can drop more than 40 inches in 24 hours.
There are fewer paved roads on Tug Hill than in most regions of comparable size in the eastern United States. The interior, including the 21,000-acre Tug Hill Wildlife Management Area and the William C. Whitney section of the Tug Hill State Forest, is reached mostly by snowmobile in winter and gravel road in summer. Settlements like Redfield, Lorraine, and Montague each list well under 1,000 year-round residents. The plateau is a quiet country, and the snow muffles what little sound there is.