Pikes Peak
— the mountain that wrote the song.
Not only on a wall.
“The fourteen-thousand-foot peak above Colorado Springs that Katharine Lee Bates climbed in 1893 and came down with America the Beautiful in her notebook. The cog railway out of Manitou Springs takes you to the summit; the highway switches up the south side. Visitors come for the view and stay for the silence above the treeline. — from the studio
Pikes Peak, 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.
Pikes Peak rises to 14,115 feet on the eastern edge of Colorado's Front Range, about ten miles west of Colorado Springs. Named for explorer Zebulon Pike, who sighted it in 1806 but never reached the summit, the mountain is the easternmost fourteener in the Rockies and the first the Great Plains see. Three ways reach the top: the nineteen-mile Pikes Peak Highway, the rebuilt Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway out of Manitou Springs, and the Barr Trail, a twelve-mile climb on foot from the cog depot.
The summit sits well above the treeline at over fourteen thousand feet, where alpine tundra takes over and the air carries about sixty percent of sea-level oxygen. Weather changes within minutes: a clear forenoon to graupel by two o'clock is the summer pattern. The summit visitor center, rebuilt in 2021, holds warmth and altitude lozenges in equal supply. Bighorn sheep and yellow-bellied marmots are the resident company at the upper switchbacks of the highway, and the road's last four miles often run under cloud while the plains below sit clear.
In July 1893, Wellesley professor Katharine Lee Bates rode a wagon to the summit, looked east across the plains, and wrote the verses that became America the Beautiful. A plaque at the summit marks the moment. The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has run on the highway each summer since 1916, second only to the Indianapolis 500 in continuous American motorsport. The AdAmAn Club has climbed the mountain to set the New Year's fireworks from the summit since 1922, adding one member each year.