Hood Canal and the Olympics
— where the mountains walk down to the salt.
Not only on a wall.
“Hood Canal is not a canal but a natural fjord, about fifty miles long, carved by the same glaciers that shaped the rest of Puget Sound. It runs north to south along the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula, then bends ninety degrees east at the Great Bend near Belfair. The Olympics rise straight from its western shore, the rain-catching side of the range. Oyster beds and small marinas line the water. Forest comes down to the tideline. In late summer the water holds the colour of the sky for an hour after the sun is gone, and the mountains darken slowly behind it.
Hood Canal and the Olympics, 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.
Hood Canal is a natural fjord on the western side of Puget Sound, in Washington State. It runs roughly fifty miles south from Admiralty Inlet, then bends east at the Great Bend near Belfair toward the Tahuya River. The western shore borders the Olympic Peninsula; the Olympic Mountains rise directly from it, and the Olympic National Forest covers much of the slope. Six rivers drain from the Olympics into the canal, including the Skokomish, Hamma Hamma, Duckabush, Dosewallips, and Big and Little Quilcene. The Hood Canal Bridge, opened in 1961 and the longest floating bridge over saltwater in the world at about 7,800 feet, crosses the north end at the entrance to the Kitsap Peninsula.
Hood Canal is one of the most productive shellfish waters in the contiguous United States. Its long narrow shape, deep cold water from glacial scour, and steady freshwater input from six Olympic rivers create the temperature and salinity that Pacific oysters, geoduck, manila clams, and Dungeness crab need. The canal supplies a large share of the state's commercial oyster harvest and is the historic home of the Skokomish Indian Tribe. The same hydrology that grows the shellfish makes summer stratification a chronic problem: warm fresh water sits on top of dense cold water, oxygen falls in the lower layer, and occasional fish kills follow in late summer.
The Olympics rise straight from the western shore: from sea level to over 7,000 feet within a few miles. Mount Constance, at 7,756 feet, sits a few miles inland from Brinnon and dominates the skyline above the central canal. The range is the first land mass Pacific storms hit after crossing open ocean, and the Olympic Rain Shadow keeps the canal itself drier than the western foothills, about thirty inches of precipitation a year on the canal against more than 150 inches near the crest. The combination of warm low water and cold high snow is what makes the light along the shoreline behave the way it does in summer.