Stone Mountain
— — a single rock the plain forgot to flatten.
Not only on a wall.
“A dome of quartz monzonite rising 825 feet above the Georgia piedmont, the largest exposed mass of its kind in the world. The summit is reached on foot by a mile-and-a-half walk-up trail or by Swiss-built cable car. The carving on the north face was begun in 1923 and finished, after long pauses, in 1972.
Stone Mountain, 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.
Stone Mountain sits sixteen miles east of downtown Atlanta in DeKalb County, Georgia. The dome rises 825 feet above the surrounding piedmont to a summit of about 1,686 feet, making it the largest exposed mass of granite — technically quartz monzonite — in the world. The rock crystallised underground roughly 300 million years ago during the Alleghanian orogeny and was exposed by long erosion of the overlying material. The state-owned park around it covers 3,200 acres and is the most visited site in Georgia, drawing several million visitors a year.
The dome is quartz monzonite, often called Stone Mountain Granite, a coarse-grained intrusive rock studded with feldspar crystals up to three inches across. It was quarried commercially from the late nineteenth century into the 1970s; stone from this site was used in the locks of the Panama Canal and the steps of the United States Capitol. The bare summit holds shallow solution pits — rock pools — that support a rare endemic plant community including the yellow daisy that blooms across the dome in late September.
The park is open year-round. The Walk-Up Trail rises about 800 feet over a mile and a half from Confederate Hall to the summit and takes most visitors an hour. The Summit Skyride, a Swiss-built cable car, runs daily in the warmer months. The carving on the north face is the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world at 158 by 76 feet and depicts three Confederate figures; it was begun by Gutzon Borglum in 1923, abandoned, then finished by Roy Faulkner in 1972. The work has been the subject of long public debate.