Sea otters at Cape Flattery
— — the otters the coast remembered how to hold.
Not only on a wall.
“Cape Flattery is the northwesternmost point of the lower forty-eight, a basalt headland on the Makah Reservation where the Strait of Juan de Fuca opens to the open Pacific. Sea otters rest in the kelp beds off the cliffs and around Tatoosh Island a half mile offshore. They were gone from the Washington coast by 1910, hunted out for the fur trade, and were brought back in 1969 and 1970 from Amchitka, in the Aleutians. The population has grown into the low thousands and the kelp forests have come with them. from the studio
Sea otters at Cape Flattery, 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.
Cape Flattery is the northwesternmost point of the contiguous United States, on the Makah Indian Reservation at the western end of the Olympic Peninsula, about eight miles west of Neah Bay. A 0.75-mile boardwalk and cedar-plank trail descends through coastal forest to four observation decks built out over the basalt sea-cliffs. Tatoosh Island sits half a mile offshore, separated from the cape by a narrow strait; the Cape Flattery Light has stood on the island since 1857. The Makah Tribe manages and maintains the trail and the cape.
Sea otters were extirpated from Washington by about 1910 after a century of maritime fur hunting. Between 1969 and 1970, 59 otters were translocated from Amchitka Island in the Aleutians to the Washington coast ahead of the underground nuclear test on Amchitka; the survivors anchored a population that today numbers in the low thousands and is concentrated between Destruction Island and Cape Flattery. The otters live in the kelp beds visible from the trail-end decks, often rafting in groups, and their return has brought the bull-kelp canopy back with them.
Visiting Cape Flattery requires a Makah Recreation Pass, available at shops in Neah Bay, which also covers the Hobuck and Shi Shi access points and the Makah Cultural and Research Center. The trail is open year-round; the boardwalk can be slick in winter. Binoculars carry the visit; the otters are reliable in calm weather but small at distance. The Makah Museum in Neah Bay holds the Ozette artifacts, recovered from a coastal village buried in a 16th-century mudslide, and is among the most important Northwest Coast collections in North America.