Columbia River from Cape Horn
— the long river that built the gorge.
Not only on a wall.
“The Columbia River seen from the basalt cliffs of Cape Horn on the Washington side, twenty-five miles east of Vancouver. The river runs more than twelve hundred miles from its headwaters in British Columbia to the bar at Astoria; this is one of the gorges it cut on the way. The water below is the lower Columbia, slow and tidal. The cliffs are the wreckage the Missoula Floods left when they scoured the channel down to the basalt. Late afternoon turns the rock the colour of old iron.
Columbia River from Cape Horn, 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.
From the basalt rim at Cape Horn the Columbia runs east toward Beacon Rock and the Cascade crest. The Columbia is the largest North American river entering the Pacific, about twelve hundred and forty miles long, draining roughly two hundred and fifty-eight thousand square miles across seven United States and British Columbia. It carries an average discharge of about two hundred and sixty-five thousand cubic feet per second at its mouth near Astoria, Oregon. Cape Horn sits inside the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, the eighty-mile canyon the river cut through the Cascades to reach the Pacific.
The water at Cape Horn is the lower Columbia, downstream of the Bonneville Dam and within tidal reach of the Pacific. The river runs slow and dark here; tugs and bulk carriers move grain, fuel, and timber between Portland and the river bar at Astoria. Salmon and steelhead pass on their migration runs, though those runs have shrunk after a century of dam construction, hatcheries, and ocean change. The Columbia carries glacial meltwater from the Canadian Rockies and runoff from seven states, so its temperature, colour, and clarity shift through the year.
The cliffs over the river are Columbia River Basalt, the flood-basalt sequence that erupted in southeastern Washington between roughly seventeen and six million years ago and flowed west to the Pacific. The Grande Ronde Basalts that form most of the gorge walls are among the largest individual lava flows on Earth. The Missoula Floods of the late Pleistocene scoured the gorge to its present width and exposed the columnar jointing now visible on the Washington wall. Cape Horn is one of the basalt headlands left standing when the floodwater dropped.