Rialto Beach sea stacks
— the surf that never quite finishes a sentence.
Not only on a wall.
“A grey-pebble beach where the Quillayute meets the Pacific, drift logs the size of barns piled at the high-tide line, sea stacks standing offshore in the fog. A mile and a half north, the surf cuts through Hole-in-the-Wall at low tide. The coast belongs to Olympic National Park and the Quileute people, and the weather changes by the hour.
Rialto Beach sea stacks, 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.
Rialto Beach lies on the Pacific coast of Washington in Clallam County, on the north side of the Quillayute River mouth, opposite the village of La Push. It is part of Olympic National Park and reached by paved road from Forks via Mora Road. The beach runs north for several miles toward Hole-in-the-Wall, a sea arch that opens through a low headland about 1.5 miles up the strand at low tide. The Quileute Tribe holds the south bank of the river.
The offshore stacks are the resistant remnants of an older coastline, basalt and harder sandstone left standing while the softer rock around them gave way to surf. James Island sits at the river mouth, a Quileute burial island and the largest of the nearshore stacks. Smaller stacks march north past Ellen Creek toward Hole-in-the-Wall. The pebbles underfoot are smoothed basalt and chert, sorted by size by every winter swell. The drift logs are old-growth cedar and spruce washed from the river system.
The coast averages around 100 inches of rain a year and the fog is part of the place, not an interruption of it. Storm surf in winter throws spray fifty feet over the stacks; July afternoons can be wind-still and grey, with bald eagles working the river bar. Tide tables matter here: Hole-in-the-Wall is only passable on the outgoing low. The Park Service posts current tide windows at the trailhead kiosk near the parking area.