Diamond Craters volcanic field
— — a young landscape still cooling in the wind.
Not only on a wall.
“Seventeen thousand acres of basalt in the Harney Basin, fifty-five miles south of Burns. Lava flows, cinder cones, spatter cones, and steep maars sit on the sagebrush plain, the youngest only about seven thousand years old. The BLM calls it an Outstanding Natural Area. A gravel loop road and a small interpretive brochure are most of the infrastructure. The light at the end of the day turns the dark rock copper. from the studio
Diamond Craters volcanic field, 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.
Diamond Craters is a roughly seventeen-thousand-acre basaltic volcanic field on the Harney Basin floor in southeastern Oregon, about fifty-five miles south of Burns and east of the small ranching community of Diamond. The Bureau of Land Management designated it an Outstanding Natural Area for the density of basaltic features in a small area. Eruptions occurred over roughly the last 25,000 years, with the most recent flows dated to about 7,000 years before present.
The field carries nearly the full vocabulary of basaltic volcanism in a single drive: pahoehoe and aa lava flows, spatter ramparts, cinder cones, lava tubes, and steep-walled maars formed where rising magma met groundwater and flashed it to steam. Malheur Maar, the largest of the explosion craters, is a few hundred feet deep with a small lake on its floor. The lava chemistry is tholeiitic basalt, similar to the Snake River Plain east into Idaho.
Access is from Oregon Route 205 south of Burns onto Lava Beds Road, a maintained gravel loop of about ten miles through the field. There is no visitor centre, no fee, and no water; the BLM publishes a self-guided auto-tour brochure with stops keyed to roadside features. Nearby anchors are Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to the west and Steens Mountain to the south. The closest fuel and lodging are in Burns or at the Diamond Hotel, a small historic inn.