Devils Tower with prairie wildflowers
— the season the grass blooms beneath the rock.
Not only on a wall.
“Late June and early July, the meadows below Devils Tower turn over to blanketflower, prairie coneflower, and the cream spikes of yucca. The tower stands behind them at 867 feet, the same monolith it always was, suddenly framed by colour at ankle height. Pronghorn cross the open ground in the morning. The bloom lasts a few weeks and the prairie returns to gold.
Devils Tower with prairie wildflowers, 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.
Devils Tower National Monument covers 1,347 acres in Crook County, northeast Wyoming, with the tower rising 867 feet above the Belle Fourche River. The surrounding grassland sits at roughly 4,200 feet at the western edge of the Black Hills uplift. Prairie grassland, ponderosa pine, and bur oak share the slopes. The closest town is Hulett, twelve miles to the northeast; Sundance and Interstate 90 lie about forty-five minutes south. The monument was the first national monument in the United States, proclaimed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.
Wildflower bloom on the monument's prairie peaks in late June and early July. Blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata) carries gold and rust along the road corridors; prairie coneflower stands tall above the grass; yucca sends up cream spikes near the talus. The same weeks coincide with the voluntary climbing closure observed by the National Park Service in respect of Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho ceremonies. By August the prairie cures to straw and the flowers are gone. The mule deer and pronghorn stay year-round.
At 4,200 feet on the western edge of the Black Hills, the air around the tower is dry and clean and carries the smell of warm pine resin most afternoons. Storms build fast in summer, the cumulus stacking over the Bighorns to the west and crossing the prairie in an hour. Wind is constant; the cottonwoods along the Belle Fourche River show its direction. The light is sharpest in the half-hour after sunrise and again before sunset, when the columns throw vertical shadow.