Mount Ascutney from Windsor
— — the mountain that stands by itself.
Not only on a wall.
“A monadnock above the Connecticut River, Ascutney rises alone — no ridge to either side, no chain to follow. From Windsor village on the river's west bank, the peak fills the horizon at 3,144 feet, a single hill where everything else is valley. The state park climbs the east side by paved road most of the way, and the summit holds a wooden observation tower with views across four states on the clear days. The Brownsville Trail comes up the north shoulder. The geology is intrusive: granite and syenite, the cooled root of an old igneous body, harder than what eroded around it. from the studio
Mount Ascutney from Windsor, 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.
Mount Ascutney rises to 3,144 feet on the west bank of the Connecticut River in Windsor County, Vermont. It is a classic monadnock — an isolated peak left standing as the softer rock around it eroded away. Geologically the mountain is a syenite-and-granite pluton, the cooled core of an igneous intrusion roughly 122 million years old, and Ascutney has given its name to the broader pattern of similar erosional remnants studied in nineteenth-century American geology. The summit lies inside Mount Ascutney State Park, established in 1935 and developed in part by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The body of the mountain is intrusive igneous rock — pink and grey syenite, granite, and gabbro — that cooled deep underground and was later unroofed by erosion. The surrounding country rock is the softer metamorphic Waits River and Gile Mountain formations, which weathered down on either side, leaving Ascutney standing roughly 2,500 feet above the river plain. The summit ledges show the coarse crystal texture clearly. A nineteenth-century quarry on the lower south slope cut Ascutney granite for monuments and architectural stone, including pieces still visible in the village of Windsor below.
The Mount Ascutney Auto Road climbs 3.7 miles from the park entrance off Route 44A to a parking area at 2,800 feet; from there, a short trail of roughly six-tenths of a mile reaches the summit observation tower. Hikers favour the Brownsville Trail (4.8 miles round trip) and the Weathersfield Trail, the latter passing Crystal Cascade waterfall. The state park charges a day-use fee in season and operates a campground from late May through Columbus Day. The summit holds a wooden tower built by the Ascutney Trails Association for the long four-state view.