Waldo Lake alpine
— — water so clear the bottom rises to meet you.
Not only on a wall.
“A wide alpine lake at about 5,414 feet, set in old-growth lodgepole and mountain hemlock. The water reads as one of the purest on the continent. Gas motors are not allowed, so the surface most mornings is a sheet, and the line where the trees meet their reflection is hard to find. Canoes go quiet here. Nobody hurries. from the studio
Waldo Lake alpine, 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.
Waldo Lake sits at 5,414 feet in the Willamette National Forest, in Lane County, Oregon, ringed by the Waldo Lake Wilderness on three sides. It is the second-largest natural lake in the state, covering about 6,300 acres, and forms part of the headwaters of the North Fork of the Middle Fork Willamette River. Access is from Forest Road 5897 off Oregon Route 58, near Oakridge, with three Forest Service campgrounds along the eastern shore. Gas-powered boats are prohibited.
Waldo is routinely cited among the clearest lakes in the world. Researchers from Oregon State University have recorded Secchi-disk readings near 120 feet, comparable to Crater Lake. The clarity is owed to a small inflow, a granite-and-pumice basin that yields almost no sediment, and water chemistry so low in dissolved nutrients that algae do not bloom. Looking down from a canoe, the eye reads twenty or thirty feet of column before the bottom resolves.
The road in is usually open by late June and closed by the first heavy snow in October or November. Early summer brings the lake's most famous local feature, a mosquito hatch heavy enough that the Forest Service posts advisories through July. By mid-August the bugs thin out, the water holds in the high sixties, and the afternoon thermal wind comes up reliably enough that sailors from Eugene drive the two hours east for it.