South Sister from Green Lakes
— — the turquoise the glacier hands down.
Not only on a wall.
“The basin sits between South Sister and Broken Top, a string of three small lakes the colour of milky jade. The water gets its tint from rock flour off the Lewis Glacier above, the same dolomitic-fine silt that paints Sorapis and Pukaki. Most hikers come up the four-and-a-half-mile trail from Cascade Lakes Highway, lose the trees around the second mile, and find the lakes laid out under the volcano. From the studio.
South Sister from Green Lakes, 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.
South Sister is the third-highest peak in Oregon at 10,358 feet, the youngest of the three stratovolcanoes that give the Three Sisters Wilderness its name. The Green Lakes basin sits roughly 6,500 feet up, cradled between South Sister to the west and Broken Top to the east, inside Deschutes National Forest. The standard approach is the Green Lakes Trail from Cascade Lakes Highway, about four and a half miles in along Fall Creek. The wilderness is managed under a limited-entry permit system from late June through late September.
The lakes read as a pale milky turquoise because of rock flour suspended in glacial meltwater off Lewis Glacier on South Sister's east flank. The particles are fine enough to stay in suspension and scatter the shorter wavelengths of sunlight, the same physics that colours Moraine Lake in the Canadian Rockies and Lake Pukaki in New Zealand. The colour is strongest in late summer when melt is steady and the sediment load is high; it dulls when the lakes ice over in winter.
The trailhead at Green Lakes off the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway is open roughly July through October; the highway closes for winter. Day hikers do not need a quota permit, but a Northwest Forest Pass is required at the trailhead and overnight visits require a Central Cascades Wilderness Permit booked in advance through Recreation.gov. The basin is at elevation and weather turns fast, so afternoon thunderstorms are common in July and August.