Steptoe Butte view of the Palouse
— — the hour the hills turn into corduroy.
Not only on a wall.
“A quartzite knob standing alone above a sea of rolling wheat. Steptoe Butte rises more than a thousand feet over the Palouse, and from the top road the farmland resolves into long combed lines of green and gold that follow every fold of the ground. Photographers come for the first and last hour of light, when the low sun draws each contour into shadow. The wind is almost always moving. From the studio.
Steptoe Butte view of the Palouse, 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.
Steptoe Butte is a solitary quartzite peak rising to 3,612 feet in Whitman County, Washington, standing roughly a thousand feet above the surrounding Palouse hills. The bedrock is older than the basalt flows that buried the rest of the region, which is why it juts above the plain rather than blending into it. A paved spiral road climbs to the summit inside Steptoe Butte State Park, about twelve miles north of Colfax. The Palouse itself is loess soil deposited by wind over the last ice age, shaped into the curved farmland the butte looks down on.
The Palouse is a landscape that is almost invisible at midday and unforgettable at the edges of the day. From the summit road the low sun rakes across the dunes of wheat, and every fold of the hills throws a long shadow that turns the patchwork into combed lines of light and dark. June greens give way to August golds, and after harvest the bare soil reads as soft brown corduroy. Sunrise carries a faint haze off the fields; sunset often holds a band of pink against the Idaho hills to the east.
The butte is open year-round, but the look of the land changes month to month. Late May and early June bring the brightest greens, when winter wheat and canola are full. By late July the wheat turns gold; harvest runs through August into early September. October leaves the hills in brown and rust, often under low fog at dawn. Winter brings snow that simplifies the contours into pure shape. Photographers tend to time visits to the week the colour they want is on the ground.