Elkhorn Crest
— — the granite ridge above the larch.
Not only on a wall.
“A ridge trail that holds the crest of the Elkhorns for twenty-three miles, granite on one shoulder, larch and lake basins on the other. Anthony Lake sits at the north end, Marble Pass at the south. Wildflowers come late here, July into August. The wind moves through subalpine fir and the ridge stays cold long after the valleys have gone gold.
Elkhorn Crest, 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.
The Elkhorn Crest National Recreation Trail runs about twenty-three miles along the spine of the Elkhorn Mountains, a granitic subrange of the Blue Mountains in northeastern Oregon. The route holds elevations between 7,000 and 8,400 feet across the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, west of Baker City. Trailheads at Anthony Lakes, Marble Pass, and Dutch Flat Saddle connect a chain of cirque lakes (Lost, Summit, Twin, Cunningham) left by Pleistocene glaciers. The crest separates the Powder River drainage to the east from the North Fork John Day to the west.
Elevation does the work here. The trail stays above 7,000 feet for most of its length, crossing open scree, whitebark pine, and stands of subalpine larch that turn gold in late September. Snow lingers in the cirques into July; the season runs short, often only a dozen weeks of clear walking. The Blue Mountains catch storms before the Wallowas to the east, and afternoon weather builds fast over Angell Peak. Mornings are usually still. By two o'clock the wind comes up off the Powder River basin.
The Elkhorns see a fraction of the traffic of the Wallowas thirty miles east. Most of the ridge sits inside the Wallowa-Whitman, with the North Fork John Day Wilderness pressing in from the west. Mountain goats were reintroduced here in the 1980s and now hold the high basins. Backpackers walk the whole crest in three or four days, but most visitors come for a section: Anthony Lakes to Lost Lake, or Marble Pass up to the spine. The trail is rarely crowded, even on August weekends.