North Head Lighthouse
— a small white tower in a hundred-mile wind.
Not only on a wall.
“A 65-foot tower on a basalt headland near Ilwaco, Washington, lit in 1898 to mark the approach from the north after ships kept losing Cape Disappointment Light a mile south. The focal plane stands roughly 194 feet above the Pacific. The keeper's house is white, the trim red, the trail down to the rocks steep enough that you watch your feet. The wind here has been clocked above a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere a buoy is ringing.
North Head Lighthouse, 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.
North Head Lighthouse stands at the northern entrance to the Columbia River, on a basalt headland inside Cape Disappointment State Park near Ilwaco, in Pacific County, Washington. The tower is 65 feet tall and the focal plane sits 194 feet above the Pacific. The United States Lighthouse Service built it in 1898 to supplement Cape Disappointment Light, which is a mile south and hidden from ships running down the coast by the same headland the new tower stands on. The Coast Guard automated the station in 1961. The keeper's quarters are now a vacation rental managed by Washington State Parks.
The headland faces straight into the open Pacific with no shelter to the west and takes the full weight of every storm that comes in. The National Weather Service cooperative station at North Head has recorded gusts above 120 miles per hour, and the site averages roughly a hundred inches of rain a year. The basalt the tower is bolted into has been worn by that weather for thousands of years. On a clear afternoon the view runs north along the Long Beach Peninsula, eighteen straight miles of sand up to Leadbetter Point, and west into the open ocean where the Columbia bar rolls white about a mile offshore.
The original optic at North Head was a first-order Fresnel lens shipped from Paris and first lit on May 16, 1898. The lens is now on display at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon, about ten miles south across the bar. The current beacon is an LED unit the United States Coast Guard maintains as an active aid to navigation, with a flashing white characteristic visible to mariners at the southwestern approach to the Columbia. Together with Cape Disappointment Light, lit in 1856, North Head guards one of the most dangerous river bars on the Pacific coast.