North Sister
— — the one the glaciers wore down first.
Not only on a wall.
“The northernmost and most eroded of the Three Sisters, a Cascade stratovolcano gone to ribs and ash. Climbers call it the hardest of the three: no walk-up route, a summit pinnacle of rotten rock, and a long traverse across the Collier Glacier to reach the south ridge. From the Mckenzie Pass highway it is the dark, asymmetric peak on the left, the one that does not look like a mountain so much as the idea of a mountain, slowly being taken apart.
North Sister, 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.
North Sister rises to 10,085 feet on the crest of the Oregon Cascades, in the Three Sisters Wilderness inside the Willamette and Deschutes national forests. It is the oldest of the three peaks, with its earliest lavas dating to roughly 400,000 years ago, and the most heavily eroded — glaciers have stripped it back to a skeletal core of basaltic andesite. The summit is the eroded plug of the volcano's central conduit. Collier Glacier, the largest glacier in Oregon by area until recent decades, lies in the saddle between North and Middle Sister.
The mountain is mostly basaltic andesite, shot through with the loose red and black scoria that climbers know as rotten rock. The summit block, called the Terrible Traverse and the Bowling Alley by guidebooks, requires moving through fall-line couloirs where pieces of the mountain regularly let go. The named glaciers — Collier on the west, Thayer on the north, Hayden and Villard on the east — sit in cirques carved by Pleistocene ice and have all retreated significantly since the first US Geological Survey measurements in 1910.
Most visitors meet North Sister at a distance from the Dee Wright Observatory on Highway 242 over Mckenzie Pass, a lava-built lookout that closes with the highway in winter. The standard climbing approach is the South Ridge from the Pole Creek trailhead east of Sisters, a two-day route requiring rope, ice axe, and a tolerance for objective hazard. The Three Sisters Wilderness has used a limited-entry permit system in summer since 2021 to manage trail crowding; permits are issued through recreation.gov.