North Cascades National Park
— — more glaciers than any park in the lower forty-eight.
Not only on a wall.
“A park of granite spires and blue ice, three hours northeast of Seattle by way of Highway 20. The peaks here carry more than three hundred glaciers — the densest concentration in the contiguous United States — and Mount Shuksan and Eldorado read like a smaller, sharper version of the Alps. Below the ice, the valleys hold old-growth cedar and the long blue tongue of Diablo Lake, which gets its color from rock flour the same way Sorapis does. The highway closes through winter. Spring opens it again. from the studio
North Cascades National Park, 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.
North Cascades National Park covers roughly 504,654 acres of northern Washington, running from the Canadian border south through some of the most rugged country in the contiguous United States. Congress established the park in 1968, together with the adjoining Ross Lake and Lake Chelan National Recreation Areas, as the North Cascades National Park Service Complex. The terrain is alpine in the strictest sense — granite and gneiss peaks pushed up and then carved by ice — with elevations rising from valley floors near 500 feet to summits above 9,000 feet on Goode Mountain and Mount Shuksan. The Skagit River drains the western slope; the Stehekin, the eastern.
The park holds more than 300 glaciers — about a third of all glaciers in the lower 48 states and more than any other park outside Alaska. Their meltwater is what gives Diablo Lake and Ross Lake their improbable turquoise color: rock flour, the same suspended dolomitic limestone particles that color Lago di Sorapis in the Dolomites and Lake Pukaki in New Zealand. The North Cascades Glacier Climate Project has tracked these glaciers annually since 1984 and documented sustained mass loss over the period. Waterfalls cascade off the hanging valleys throughout the warm months; in summer the rivers run cold and full.
Most visitors enter via the North Cascades Highway, State Route 20, which crosses the park complex between Marblemount and Mazama. The road is plowed seasonally and typically closes between late November and mid-April at Rainy Pass and Washington Pass, depending on snowfall. There is no entrance fee. The headquarters is in Sedro-Woolley, west of the park; the main visitor center is at Newhalem on the Skagit River. The town of Stehekin, at the head of Lake Chelan, is reachable only by foot, ferry, or floatplane — a fifty-mile lake without a road.