Channeled Scablands
— — the shape a flood leaves when it leaves.
Not only on a wall.
“A landscape carved in days, not eras. Toward the end of the last Ice Age, glacial Lake Missoula broke its ice dam dozens of times and sent water across eastern Washington at a scale geologists spent decades refusing to believe. The flood stripped the soil off the basalt and left coulees, dry waterfalls, and gravel bars the size of small towns. At Dry Falls the cliff stands 400 feet above an empty plunge pool that was once the largest waterfall on Earth. The sage holds the heat into the evening. The light goes long and low across the basalt. — from the studio
Channeled Scablands, 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.
The Channeled Scablands cover roughly 2,000 square miles of the Columbia Plateau in eastern Washington, from the Spokane area southwest toward the Snake and Columbia rivers. The terrain was scoured by the Missoula Floods between about 18,000 and 13,000 years ago, when glacial Lake Missoula repeatedly burst through an ice dam in present-day Idaho. Geologist J Harlen Bretz proposed the catastrophic-flood explanation in the 1920s and was rejected by his field for nearly forty years before the evidence held. The Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail, established by Congress in 2009, now interprets the route.
The bedrock is Columbia River Basalt — flood lavas that erupted between roughly 17 and 6 million years ago and laid down a stack more than 1,800 metres thick in places. The Missoula Floods stripped the loess soil off the top and cut directly into the basalt, leaving the dry channels, scabs, and recessional cataracts that name the region. At Dry Falls in Grant County, a horseshoe cliff stands about 400 feet high and roughly 3.5 miles wide — at flood peak it carried an estimated ten times the combined flow of every river on Earth today. Palouse Falls still runs.
The plateau sits in the rain shadow of the Cascades and runs dry and clear through most of the warm months — Grant County averages roughly eight inches of precipitation a year, less than Phoenix. The result is high-contrast light across dark basalt and pale grass that reads almost gold in late afternoon. Sunset over Dry Falls Lake throws the cliff wall into silhouette against the western sky around 8:30 p.m. in midsummer. Palouse Falls runs hardest from snowmelt in April and May. Winters are cold and quiet; the canyons hold ice through February.