Rogue River wild and scenic
— — the river the federal law tried to keep.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the first eight rivers Congress set aside under the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Thirty-three miles of the lower canyon are reachable only by raft, drift boat, or the trail along the north bank. Black bears come down to fish in late summer. The water runs jade where the riffles slow. Permits are drawn by lottery between May and October.
Rogue River wild and scenic, 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 Rogue rises near Crater Lake in the High Cascades and runs about 215 miles to the Pacific at Gold Beach in Curry County. Congress designated 84 miles as Wild and Scenic in 1968, one of the original eight rivers under the new Act. The 33.6-mile Wild section between Grave Creek and Watson Creek is reachable only on foot or by boat. The river drains into the Pacific past the dunes south of Bandon, fed along the way by the Illinois and the Applegate.
The lower canyon water runs a clear pale jade through riffles at Rainie Falls and Mule Creek. The river carries cold flow from the Cascades and the Siskiyou foothills; in summer the upper reaches stay near sixty degrees while the lower river warms into the seventies. Chinook salmon and winter steelhead use the run, and so do river otter and a resident lower-Rogue population of black bears, which often fish the shallows above Blossom Bar in August.
From May 15 through October 15 the Bureau of Land Management runs a permit lottery for floats through the Wild section; only about 120 people launch per day, with applications taken the previous winter. Most parties take three to four days from Grave Creek to Foster Bar, camping on the gravel beaches. Outside the lottery window no permit is required, but flows can run cold and high. The Rogue River Trail, opened in stages by the Forest Service after 1908, parallels the north bank for forty miles.