Wind Cave National Park
— — a calcite honeycomb under the prairie.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the oldest national parks in the country, set aside by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 on the prairie edge of the Black Hills. Above ground it is mixed-grass prairie and ponderosa hills, with bison, elk, and pronghorn moving through. Below ground are more than 250 mapped kilometres of cave passage, walls feathered with boxwork — a calcite formation rarer below the surface than the bison are above it.
Wind Cave National Park, 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.
Wind Cave National Park sits in Custer County in the southern Black Hills of South Dakota, covering about 137 square kilometres of mixed-grass prairie, ponderosa pine forest, and the cave system beneath. Theodore Roosevelt signed it into being on 9 January 1903 — the seventh national park established, and the first set aside anywhere to protect a cave. The Lakota name for the cave is Maka Oniye, 'breathing earth', and the place figures in Lakota emergence stories. The park borders Custer State Park to the north, about 100 kilometres south of Rapid City.
Surveyors have mapped over 260 kilometres of passage at Wind Cave, ranking it among the longest caves in the world. The walls are known for boxwork — thin honeycomb fins of calcite that filled fractures in the limestone before the surrounding rock dissolved away. Wind Cave holds an estimated 95 percent of the world's known boxwork. The cave breathes; differences between atmospheric pressure inside and outside push air through the natural entrance at speeds up to 110 kilometres per hour, the phenomenon that named the place when Tom and Jesse Bingham found it in 1881.
Above ground the park preserves one of the largest remnants of mixed-grass prairie in North America. A herd of about 400 plains bison, descended from animals reintroduced from the Bronx Zoo in 1913, grazes the same grass on which the boundary lines were drawn. Pronghorn, elk, prairie dogs, and coyotes share the open country; black-footed ferrets were released into the prairie-dog towns starting in 2007. Summer mornings are still and yellow; thunderstorms build in the afternoons over Rankin Ridge, the park's high point at 1,587 metres.