Dry Falls Lake
— — the cliff where a waterfall used to be.
Not only on a wall.
“A horseshoe of basalt cliff three and a half miles wide, with a small lake at its foot and dry sky where the water should be. During the Missoula floods at the end of the last ice age, a wall of meltwater poured over this rim and cut the cliff back upstream. The falls left when the ice did. What remains is the silhouette — a dark amphitheatre above flat blue water, with sage and rimrock on every side. The viewpoint at Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park looks straight into it. Most afternoons the basalt holds the heat and the lake holds the sky. — from the studio
Dry Falls Lake, 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.
Dry Falls is a 3.5-mile escarpment of Columbia River basalt in Grant County, Washington, about 400 feet high at its rim. It sits inside Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park, on State Route 17 north of Soap Lake. The cliff is the abandoned headwall of a cataract that ran during the Missoula floods of the last glacial period, when an ice dam at Lake Missoula failed repeatedly and routed water across the Columbia Plateau. A small lake — Dry Falls Lake — lies in the plunge basin at the base. The visitor centre on the rim is open seasonally and looks south across the whole horseshoe.
The cliff is Columbia River Basalt Group rock, a stack of flood-basalt flows poured out of fissures in eastern Washington and Oregon between roughly 17 and 6 million years ago. Each flow cooled into columnar joints; the floodwater plucked the columns out one by one and walked the cataract upstream from the Quincy Basin. The result is a layered, dark grey wall with sharp vertical seams and a talus skirt at the base. The same basalt forms the cliffs at Palouse Falls and the canyon walls along the Columbia River downstream, so the visual signature is recognisable across the Channeled Scablands as a region.
The Dry Falls Visitor Center sits on the rim at the north end of the park and is open spring through fall; the overlook itself is accessible year-round. Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park is one of Washington's larger state parks, with a campground, day-use area, and a separate access road that drops down to the basin lakes. A Discover Pass is required to park. The light reads strongest from late afternoon, when the western sun rakes across the cliff face. Summer temperatures on the rim regularly exceed 90°F, and shade is scarce; the basin lakes draw most of the swimming traffic in July and August.