Strawberry Mountain Wilderness
— — five climates stacked on one mountain.
Not only on a wall.
“The wilderness rises out of sagebrush country in Grant County and stops just short of the alpine: roughly nine thousand feet of mountain inside seventy thousand acres of forest. Strawberry Lake sits in a glacial cirque a mile up from the campground, and the trail keeps climbing past it. Few people come here. The Blue Mountains keep their best country quiet.
Strawberry Mountain Wilderness, 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.
Strawberry Mountain Wilderness covers about 69,350 acres on the Malheur National Forest in Grant County, eastern Oregon, designated by the Wilderness Act of 1964. The range runs roughly east-to-west south of the town of Prairie City, with Strawberry Mountain itself topping out at 9,038 feet. Strawberry Lake, the most visited destination, sits at about 6,300 feet inside a glacial cirque carved into the north face. Trailheads at Strawberry Campground and Indian Creek give access to a small network of footpaths that climb through the range.
Few wildernesses in the lower forty-eight stack so many ecosystems on a single mountain. The lower slopes are sagebrush steppe and juniper, giving way to ponderosa pine, then mixed conifer, then subalpine fir and whitebark pine near the summit ridge — five distinct life zones inside a vertical mile. The Forest Service notes the range hosts plant communities found nowhere else in eastern Oregon. The air thins fast above Strawberry Lake, and the dry continental climate keeps the high country cold long after the valley below has warmed.
This is one of the least-trafficked wildernesses in Oregon. The Malheur National Forest reports only a few thousand visitors a year to Strawberry Lake, and the upper basins see a fraction of that. Grant County itself has fewer than seven thousand residents, and the nearest interstate is more than a hundred miles away. The result is a kind of held quiet: wind, water moving over rock, the occasional pika. Outfitters in John Day still pack the high lakes by horse the way they have for a century.