Whiteface Mountain summit
— the bare rock the wind has been working since the ice left.
Not only on a wall.
“Whiteface stands a little apart from the rest of the High Peaks, which is why on a clear day the summit gives you Vermont, Montréal weather coming south, and the long Adirondack interior all at once. The top is alpine: bare anorthosite, lichen, and wind. A toll road and an elevator cut through the upper mountain so visitors without a long climb can still stand above tree line. The light up there is older than the road.
Whiteface Mountain summit, 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.
Whiteface Mountain rises to 4,867 feet in the town of Wilmington, Essex County, about ten miles north of Lake Placid inside Adirondack Park. It is the fifth-highest peak in New York and one of the forty-six High Peaks. Whiteface stands apart from the main High Peaks cluster to the south, which gives the summit an unusually open view in three directions: Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east, the Saint Lawrence Valley to the north, and the central Adirondacks to the southwest.
The summit cap is anorthosite, a coarse pale-gray rock made mostly of plagioclase feldspar. It is the same stone that floors most of the High Peaks and that gives Whiteface its name, since the bare rock above tree line reads as a pale streak from a distance. The Veterans Memorial Highway climbs the upper mountain from Wilmington and ends at a stone parking area at 4,610 feet; a tunnel and elevator cut from the bedrock by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s carry visitors the last 267 feet to the true summit.
The mountain has two faces. The Whiteface Mountain Ski Center on the southeast slope, run by the Olympic Regional Development Authority, hosted the alpine events of the 1980 Winter Olympics and has the largest vertical drop east of the Rockies at 3,430 feet. The Veterans Memorial Highway on the north side is open from mid-May through mid-October most years, weather permitting; the toll station is in Wilmington. Hiking trails from Connery Pond and Whiteface Landing reach the summit on foot for those who want the long way up.