Crater Lake winter blue ice
— — cobalt under a quiet ledge of snow.
Not only on a wall.
“Crater Lake almost never freezes. The water is too deep, the wind too steady, and the cobalt holds through January. The colour reads its strongest against a rim buried under feet of new snow. From a plowed pullout above Rim Village the lake sits dark and open below a white wall, the ice that matters all on the shore. — from the studio
Crater Lake winter blue ice, 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.
Crater Lake fills the caldera of Mount Mazama in the southern Oregon Cascades. At 1,943 feet, it is the deepest lake in the United States. The lake holds about 4.9 trillion gallons of water and has no inflow or outflow stream, fed only by snow and rain. The lake surface rests at 6,178 feet, and the rim above it climbs to 8,929 feet at Mount Scott on the eastern edge. Crater Lake National Park encompasses the lake and its drainage.
The lake reads cobalt because its depth, clarity, and lack of sediment let sunlight penetrate well past 100 metres. The long red wavelengths are absorbed quickly. Blue is what comes back. In winter the contrast sharpens. Fresh snow on the rim is brilliant white, the water beneath darker and more saturated than in summer. Surface ice forms only along the shallow caldera shore and rarely covers any significant area; the lake has fully frozen only a handful of times since record-keeping began in 1885.
Winter at Crater Lake is long. Snow begins falling in October and the rim averages about 41 feet of accumulation per year. Rim Drive closes; the only open road is the south entrance to Rim Village, plowed daily by the park service. Crater Lake Lodge closes for the season in mid-October; the Annie Creek snowshoe routes and the Mazama Village area host the bulk of winter visitors. Ranger-led snowshoe walks run on weekends from late November through April, weather permitting.