Santa Cruz Island
— — the island the mainland forgot to keep.
Not only on a wall.
“Largest of California's Channel Islands, an hour by boat from Ventura. Twenty-two miles long and almost ninety percent unbuilt, the island holds Painted Cave, one of the largest sea caves on Earth, and the island fox, a species found nowhere else. The mainland sits across a clear channel that on most days isn't crossed.
Santa Cruz Island, 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.
Santa Cruz is the largest of California's eight Channel Islands, at 96 square miles and 22 miles long, lying about 20 miles off the coast of Ventura. The island is jointly managed by The Nature Conservancy, which holds roughly 76 percent of the land, and the National Park Service, which oversees the eastern quarter as part of Channel Islands National Park. The park was established in 1980 and protects five of the eight islands across an archipelago that stretches south from Point Conception along the Southern California coast.
The island has no resident human population beyond a handful of rangers and field researchers. Access is by Island Packers boat from Ventura or Oxnard, typically about an hour each way, and the dock at Scorpion Anchorage is the most-visited landing. Beyond the small ranger station the island falls quiet, with only the calls of the endemic island scrub-jay and the bark of California sea lions hauled out along the cliffs. The interior road network is closed to private vehicles, and most visitors leave on the last afternoon boat.
The waters around the island fold into deep kelp forests and one of the most biologically rich marine environments on the Pacific coast. Painted Cave, at the northwest tip, is among the largest sea caves in the world: nearly a quarter-mile deep, with a 130-foot entrance and walls streaked in lichen, algae, and mineral colour that lend the cave its name. Blue whales feed in the Santa Barbara Channel each summer, and pods of common dolphins regularly cross the boat's wake on the way out from the harbour.