Owens Valley
— — the long valley the sky leans down to.
Not only on a wall.
“A long high-desert valley in eastern California, held between the Sierra Nevada to the west and the White and Inyo Mountains to the east. Mount Whitney rises above Lone Pine; the bristlecone pines hold the eastern ridge. Highway 395 runs the length of the floor. The light here is among the cleanest in the lower forty-eight, and the sky comes down further than it does most other places.
Owens Valley, 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.
Owens Valley runs about 120 km north to south through eastern California, between the eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada and the White and Inyo Mountains. The valley floor sits near 1,200 metres, with Mount Whitney above Lone Pine at 4,421 metres, the highest summit in the contiguous United States. By relative relief, the valley is the deepest in the country. US Route 395 runs its length through Independence, Big Pine, and Bishop. The Owens River once filled Owens Lake at the southern end; the Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in 1913, drained most of the lake bed.
The valley sits in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada. The air is dry, the dust is alkali, and the night sky is among the darkest in California, with the eastern Sierra dark-sky country reaching some of the lowest light-pollution readings in the lower forty-eight. The bristlecone pines on the White Mountain crest above the valley are among the oldest individual trees in the world, with one specimen dated to over 4,800 years. The wind off the Sierra crest can rise to gale force without much warning in spring.
Owens Valley is a place of memory as much as landscape. Manzanar, the World War II camp where the United States incarcerated more than 11,000 Japanese Americans, sits on the valley floor below Independence; the National Park Service preserves the site as Manzanar National Historic Site. The drained Owens Lake bed south of Lone Pine remains one of North America's largest single sources of windblown dust, a long consequence of the 1913 aqueduct. The Alabama Hills west of Lone Pine, used as a backdrop for Western films since the 1920s, hold the visual silence the rest of the valley carries between towns.