Devils Lake Cascades
— — water so clear the bottom looks like the surface.
Not only on a wall.
“A shallow alpine lake at fifty-four hundred feet, on the way up to the South Sister climber's trail. The colour comes from a pale pumice bottom showing through cold, almost particle-free water — turquoise in the middle, green at the edges. Cars pull off the Cascade Lakes Highway and the people in them tend to stand quietly for a minute before they walk down. from the studio
Devils Lake Cascades, 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.
Devils Lake is a small, shallow alpine lake on the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway about thirty miles southwest of Bend, sitting at roughly 5,450 feet in the Deschutes National Forest. The lake is fed by snowmelt and a few cold springs; its bottom is pale volcanic pumice from the surrounding Three Sisters complex. Across the highway, the South Sister climber's trail leaves the parking area and climbs toward the 10,358-foot summit through Three Sisters Wilderness.
The lake's signature green-and-turquoise reads the way it does because the water is exceptionally clean and the bottom is uniformly pale. Shallower pumice shelves bounce yellow-green light back up; the deeper centre, six to eight feet down, scatters blue. Without the suspended glacial flour that colours nearby Sparks Lake or Sorapis in the Dolomites, Devils Lake is simply clear over light volcanic rock, which is rarer than the cliché image of an alpine lake suggests.
The lake sits right against the Cascade Lakes Highway (Forest Road 46), open roughly from late June into October depending on snowpack; the road closes through winter. A small Forest Service campground and a day-use picnic area handle most visitors. The South Sister climb is a long single-day haul of about twelve miles round-trip and 4,900 feet of gain; quotas through the Central Cascades Wilderness Permit system limit summer overnight and day-use entries.