Hayden Valley bison herd
— — a thousand dark shapes moving through the sage.
Not only on a wall.
“The valley the Yellowstone River cuts across between Canyon Village and Fishing Bridge. In summer mornings the herd drifts in long lines through the sage and meadow grass, calves keeping close. Pull-offs along the Grand Loop fill quietly. People stay in their cars, watch, and don't say much. The valley belongs to the bison; the road is just allowed through. — from the studio
Hayden Valley bison herd, 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.
Hayden Valley sits in the central interior of Yellowstone National Park, a roughly seven-mile stretch of open sub-alpine meadow at about 7,800 feet, cradled by the Yellowstone River as it runs north from Yellowstone Lake toward the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The valley floor is the bed of an ancient lake left after Pleistocene glaciation, which is why the soils hold water and grow grass instead of lodgepole pine. It is reached from the Grand Loop Road between Canyon Village and Fishing Bridge.
Hayden is one of the most reliable places in the lower 48 to see a wild bison herd at scale — Yellowstone's northern and central herds together number roughly 4,000 to 5,000 animals, and a sizable portion summers here. Wolves of the Wapiti Lake pack range across the valley, and grizzlies work the river willows in spring. The valley keeps a kind of quiet the road can't break, because the animals are too large to hurry and the people watching learn to wait.
The valley is best from late May, when calves are born and turn the herd a soft red-brown, through early autumn, when the rut roars across the meadows in August and bulls fight on open ground. By October the herd begins drifting toward lower winter range near the Lamar and Madison. The Grand Loop Road through Hayden typically closes to wheeled vehicles in early November and reopens in late April, after the spring plow.