Medicine Bow Peak in the Snowy Range
— — the last white seam against a hard blue sky.
Not only on a wall.
“A quartzite ridge above two small lakes, Marie and Mirror, at the head of the Snowy Range. The peak carries snow into July, and the byway up from Centennial closes for the better part of every year. People who know the Snowies talk about them the way other people talk about the Tetons, only quieter, and with the road to themselves.
Medicine Bow Peak in the Snowy Range, 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.
Medicine Bow Peak is the high point of the Snowy Range, the central spine of the Medicine Bow National Forest in southeast Wyoming. The summit sits at 12,013 feet, reached on foot from Lake Marie or Mirror Lake along trails climbing roughly 1,600 feet over three miles. The peak rises west of Laramie and is the most prominent summit between the Front Range and the Wind Rivers, signed across the alpine zone along the Snowy Range Scenic Byway.
The ridge is built of Medicine Peak Quartzite, a hard pink-and-white metamorphic rock laid down as beach sand roughly two billion years ago and welded under pressure during the Medicine Bow Orogeny. Freeze-thaw has shattered it into the pale talus that runs down to Lake Marie. The same quartzite holds up Browns Peak and the rest of the cirque rim, which is why the summit ridge stays sharp where softer ranges have rounded off.
WY-130, the Snowy Range Scenic Byway, is the only paved route across the range and closes from roughly mid-October to Memorial Day weekend depending on snowpack. Lake Marie typically thaws in late June. The summit holds patches of snow into August in heavy years. Thunderstorms build most summer afternoons, so the standard trip starts before dawn from the Lake Marie trailhead at 10,480 feet and is off the ridge by noon.