Voyageurs National Park
— — a park you can only really enter by water.
Not only on a wall.
“A wilderness of interconnected lakes along the Minnesota–Ontario border, named for the French-Canadian fur traders who paddled birch-bark canoes through here in the eighteenth century. Roughly 40 percent of the park's 218,000 acres is water — Rainy, Kabetogama, Namakan, and Sand Point. The roads end at the visitor centres; everything past that is canoe, houseboat, or skiff. In winter the lakes freeze into an ice road. On clear nights the sky here is dark enough to count as one of the country's certified Dark Sky parks. — from the studio
Voyageurs National Park, 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.
Voyageurs National Park covers about 218,200 acres along the Minnesota–Ontario border in Koochiching and St. Louis Counties, with International Falls as its gateway town. Congress authorised the park in 1971 and it was formally established in 1975. Roughly 40 percent of the park is water, organised around four large lakes — Rainy, Kabetogama, Namakan, and Sand Point — and dozens of smaller interior lakes on the Kabetogama Peninsula. The park sits on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, with Precambrian bedrock more than 2.7 billion years old exposed along the shoreline. Elevation runs around 340 metres above sea level.
The park takes its name from the French-Canadian voyageurs who paddled 26-foot canot du nord through this route as part of the Montreal-to-Athabasca fur trade between roughly 1730 and 1850, carrying beaver pelts south and trade goods north. The four large lakes form a navigable chain reaching from Black Bay on Rainy Lake through the Kettle Falls dam into Namakan and Sand Point. Past the visitor centres there are no roads. Travel inside the park is by canoe, motorboat, houseboat, or in winter by snowmobile and ski across the frozen surface. The Kabetogama Peninsula at the centre is wilderness-managed.
Voyageurs was designated an International Dark Sky Park in 2020, joining a small set of U.S. parks where the night sky meets formal darkness criteria. On clear winter nights the aurora borealis is visible from the lake ice; in summer the Milky Way reads unmistakably overhead. The park's three visitor centres — Rainy Lake, Kabetogama Lake, and Ash River — close after dusk, leaving the interior to loons, wolves, and the occasional houseboat anchor light. The Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people of the Bois Forte and Rainy Lake bands have lived in this watershed for centuries and still hold treaty rights here.