Lake Crescent emerald waters
— the green you can see down through.
Not only on a wall.
“Lake Crescent is a long glacial lake along the north edge of Olympic National Park, west of Port Angeles. The water is the colour the name promises, a deep mineral green that holds its clarity down through fathoms because there is almost no nitrogen in the basin to feed algae. Storm King Mountain sits over the south shore. The lodge has been open since 1915. The lake holds two trout that exist nowhere else, the Beardslee and the Crescenti, both descended from steelhead the last ice age sealed in.
Lake Crescent emerald waters, 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.
Lake Crescent lies in a glacially carved basin on the north side of Olympic National Park, about 17 miles west of Port Angeles on US Route 101. The lake is roughly 12 miles long and a mile wide, with Storm King Mountain rising to about 4,534 feet from the south shore. Official soundings put its deepest point at around 624 feet, though local sources have long claimed the bottom drops further in the deepest holes. The historic Lake Crescent Lodge has stood on the south shore since 1915. The Spruce Railroad Trail traces the old log-haul grade along the north shore, and Marymere Falls is a short forested walk south of the lodge.
The water reads deep emerald close in and turquoise-blue toward the centre, a colour that comes from the basin's near-absence of nitrogen. With no nitrogen, the lake cannot support the algae that turn most freshwater lakes opaque green-brown in summer. The lake instead holds Olympic Mountain rainwater at low nutrient load and high clarity. The colour shifts with the light and the angle of approach; on overcast days the green deepens; in late morning sun the green opens out to turquoise. Wood and stone in fifteen feet of water look as if they are under glass.
Visibility in Lake Crescent reaches about sixty feet on a still day, exceptional for a North American lake. The basin is cold, low in nutrients, and largely closed to outside fish populations; the last ice age left two endemic trout in the lake, the Beardslee rainbow and the Crescenti cutthroat, both descended from steelhead and cutthroat strains sealed in when the lake's outlet was blocked by a landslide. The Beardslee can reach over twenty pounds. Visitors fish under catch-and-release rules to keep both populations protected. The lake never freezes. The combination of clarity, depth, and silence is rare and the park manages it carefully.