Joseph Oregon village and Wallowa Mountains
— — the alps Oregon kept to itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A small ranching town at the south end of the Wallowa Valley, with a single main street of bronze sculptures and the granite wall of the Wallowa Mountains closing the horizon. Joseph is named for Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, whose people summered in this valley until 1877. The town sits at about 4,200 feet, six miles north of Wallowa Lake, where a tramway climbs to 8,150 feet on Mount Howard. Winters are long and clean. Summer afternoons smell of cut hay and pine. from the studio
Joseph Oregon village and Wallowa Mountains, 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.
Joseph sits at the south end of the Wallowa Valley in the far northeast corner of Oregon, at an elevation of about 4,203 feet. The town was incorporated in 1887 and named for Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader whose band wintered along the lower Wallowa and summered in this high valley until the U.S. Army forced their removal in 1877. The Wallowa Mountains, often called the Oregon Alps, rise abruptly from the valley floor and reach 9,838 feet at the summit of the Matterhorn. The town has held under 1,200 residents through most of its history and remains the gateway to Wallowa Lake, six miles south.
The Wallowas are built mostly of granite, uplifted and then carved by Pleistocene glaciers into the U-shaped valleys and tarns that give the range its alpine look. Wallowa Lake itself is held by two of the cleanest examples of glacial moraines in North America, lateral and terminal ridges several hundred feet high. Joseph's main street is lined with bronze sculptures cast at the town's foundries, which have operated here since the early 1980s and made the town a regional centre for bronze casting. Chief Joseph's grave sits above the lake's north end, marked by a stone monument added in 1926.
The town is most easily reached by Oregon Route 82 from La Grande, about 70 miles to the west. The Wallowa Lake Tramway, the steepest vertical lift in North America, runs from the lake's south end to the summit of Mount Howard at 8,150 feet; it operates roughly Memorial Day through late September. The Eagle Cap Wilderness, 360,000 acres of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, begins where the road ends. Chief Joseph Days, the town's largest annual event, is held the last full weekend in July and includes a four-day rodeo, a Nez Perce friendship feast, and a parade through town.