Sol Duc Falls three-channel cascade
— — the river that walks out three doors at once.
Not only on a wall.
“A short walk through old-growth hemlock and cedar in Olympic National Park, then the Sol Duc River comes off a basalt ledge in three separate channels at once. Sometimes four when the snowmelt runs hard. A footbridge crosses just below the lip of the gorge. The mist holds steady. Quietest in the first hour after the trailhead opens.
Sol Duc Falls three-channel cascade, 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.
Sol Duc Falls sits in the Sol Duc Valley of Olympic National Park, in the rainforest interior of Washington's Olympic Peninsula. The trailhead is at the end of Sol Duc Hot Springs Road, about twelve miles south of US Route 101 near Lake Crescent. A level 0.8-mile path through old-growth Douglas fir, western hemlock, and red cedar leads to a footbridge over Canyon Creek, with the falls dropping roughly forty-eight feet into a narrow gorge. The valley is part of the larger Olympic temperate rainforest ecosystem.
The river splits at the falls because the basalt ledge has been cut by parallel joints, sending the Sol Duc out in three distinct channels, and occasionally a fourth when winter runoff peaks. The Sol Duc carries one of the Olympic Peninsula's strong salmon runs — coho, chinook, and steelhead — upstream from the Pacific each year. Below the falls the gorge narrows into a slot the river has been working for thousands of years. The footbridge is the only crossing inside the gorge.
The Sol Duc Valley receives roughly twelve feet of rainfall a year, part of the wettest corner of the contiguous United States. The air at the falls is almost always damp, the moss on the bigleaf maples thick enough to muffle footsteps. Even in August the spray off the three channels keeps the gorge cool. The footpath itself stays open through every season, though Sol Duc Hot Springs Road closes from late autumn until late spring, leaving the falls reachable only by ski or snowshoe in winter.