Steens Mountain east escarpment
— — a wall the desert runs into.
Not only on a wall.
“The east face of Steens Mountain falls nearly a vertical mile in a single fault-block sweep, from a 9,733-foot summit ridge down to the salt flats of the Alvord Desert. There is no foothill. The wall just stands. From the playa floor it reads as the longest unbroken escarpment in the American West, lit copper at sunrise and slate-blue by mid-afternoon. The dirt road up the back side closes with the first heavy snow each fall. From the studio.
Steens Mountain east escarpment, 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.
Steens Mountain is a fault-block range in Harney County, Oregon, with a long western tilt and an abrupt east face that drops from a summit of 9,733 feet to the Alvord Desert playa at about 4,000 feet. The escarpment rises roughly 5,500 vertical feet in under three horizontal miles. The mountain is managed by the Bureau of Land Management under the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act of 2000, which established the 170,000-acre Steens Mountain Wilderness.
From the Alvord Desert floor the east escarpment catches the first sun before anything else in the basin. At sunrise the upper third of the wall lights copper while the playa below holds night. By late afternoon the face turns from warm rock to a slate blue as the sun crosses behind the ridge and the wall casts a shadow east across the salt. Photographers work the basin from the Alvord Hot Springs side road and the dry-lake access tracks south of Fields.
The Steens Mountain Loop Road climbs the gentler west side from Frenchglen and reaches viewpoints above the escarpment at roughly 9,000 feet. The road is gravel, BLM-managed, and typically open July through October; the gate closes with the first heavy snow. The desert side is reached via Highway 205 to Fields and the Fields-Denio Road north along the playa. The escarpment is not accessible by trail from below.