Mount Jefferson Wilderness alpine meadows
— — the week the meadow turned pink.
Not only on a wall.
“The Mount Jefferson Wilderness holds some of the gentlest alpine meadows in the Cascades. The country opens above 5,000 feet — Jefferson Park, Eight Lakes Basin, Pamelia, Hunts Cove, the Marion Lake country — heather, paintbrush, lupine, and bistort run across the openings while the mountain sits south of it all. The wildflower window is short. Snow holds into July and the basins burn off fast. People who walk in tend to slow down once the trees thin, and the meadow does the rest of the work. from the studio
Mount Jefferson Wilderness alpine meadows, 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 Mount Jefferson Wilderness covers 111,177 acres of the central Oregon Cascades, established by the Wilderness Act addition of 1968 and administered jointly by the Willamette, Deschutes, and Mount Hood National Forests. The wilderness centers on Mount Jefferson (10,497 ft), Oregon's second-highest peak, and Three Fingered Jack (7,844 ft) to the south. About 150 lakes and 190 miles of trail thread through it, including a 40-mile stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail. Meadows open above roughly 5,000 feet between the timbered benches.
Snowmelt drives the meadow calendar. In an average year the high basins clear by mid-July; bloom runs late July through mid-August, with magenta paintbrush, lupine, bistort, and pink heather across openings like Jefferson Park, Eight Lakes Basin, and the meadows above Marion Lake. The 2003 B&B Complex burned 90,769 acres across the wilderness and the 2020 Lionshead Fire added more than 200,000 acres on the west side; both rewrote approach corridors and left long stretches of standing snags through what used to be closed forest.
Since 2021 a Limited Entry Permit through Recreation.gov has been required for day and overnight use of most high-traffic trailheads in the wilderness from mid-June through mid-October, part of the Central Cascades Wilderness Strategy run by the Deschutes and Willamette National Forests. Designated camping, no campfires above 5,700 feet in several zones, and a Northwest Forest Pass at the trailhead are standard. Main access points are Whitewater, Pamelia Lake, Marion Lake, Jack Lake, and Duffy Lake; service towns are Detroit and Sisters.