Bighorn Basin Painted Desert
— — red and ochre laid down in bands, then weathered open.
Not only on a wall.
“Between the Bighorn Mountains and the Absarokas, the Bighorn Basin opens into a hundred-mile bowl of layered sediments worn into badlands of red, ochre, and ash grey. The Willwood Formation holds one of the densest early Eocene mammal-fossil records on Earth. In late afternoon the colour stack reads almost vertical, the sun catching one band at a time as it crosses the slopes.
Bighorn Basin Painted Desert, 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.
The Bighorn Basin is a structural depression in north-central Wyoming, bounded by the Bighorn Mountains to the east, the Absaroka Range to the west, and the Owl Creek Mountains to the south. It covers roughly 22,000 square miles and includes the towns of Cody, Greybull, Worland, and Lovell. The basin's exposed sediments belong primarily to the Willwood, Wasatch, and Chugwater Formations, laid down between the Triassic and early Eocene. Erosion has stripped these layers into badlands and painted hills, especially along the basin's western edge between Meeteetse and Greybull.
The reds and oranges come from oxidised iron in the Chugwater Formation, a Triassic siltstone exposed in long bands along the basin's flanks. Above and below it, the Willwood and Wasatch Formations contribute paler yellows, whites, and grey-greens from variegated paleosols. Geologists working the Willwood since the 1880s have used the colour bands as stratigraphic markers; the same bands carry one of the world's most complete records of early Eocene mammal evolution. The colour stack reads strongest in the hour before sunset, when the sun rakes the slopes at a low angle.
The basin sits in a rain shadow between two ranges and runs dry through most of the year. Average annual precipitation in Worland is around 8.5 inches, less than parts of the Mojave. Clear skies and low humidity give the painted slopes a flat, even, slightly raking light through long mid-summer afternoons; in winter the same light comes in earlier and lower and reads almost vermillion. Bureau of Land Management lands along US-20 and Wyoming Highway 31 offer the most open views of the colour bands.