Minerva Terrace at Mammoth
— — travertine the colour of candle wax, drawn in stair-steps.
Not only on a wall.
“A travertine terrace at Mammoth, hot water lifting calcium carbonate out of the limestone underneath and laying it back down in stair-stepped basins. Minerva is the photographed one, the terrace with the cream-and-orange shelves, though the flow shifts and the spring has gone dry and come back more than once in the last century. When it runs, the colour is the colour of candle wax.
Minerva Terrace at Mammoth, 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.
Minerva Terrace sits on the Lower Terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, in the northwest corner of Yellowstone, five miles south of the North Entrance at Gardiner. The terrace is one of about fifty active and dormant features along the Mammoth boardwalk and historically one of the most photographed. The springs draw heated water from a buried fault system, carry it up through Mississippian-age limestone, and deposit travertine, a calcium carbonate crust, at a basin-wide rate of roughly two tons per day when the system runs at full flow.
The cream-white shelves are pure travertine. The oranges, yellows, and browns are thermophilic bacteria and algae living at the warm edges of the flowing water, banded by temperature like the runoff rings at Grand Prismatic. When a vent shifts, the colour shifts within weeks: bright cream where water has just begun running, grey where a shelf has been dry long enough for the bacteria to die and the rock to dull. Minerva has cycled between bright and grey several times since the 1890s.
The Lower Terraces boardwalk is a roughly half-mile loop with stairs, beginning at the Liberty Cap parking area on the Grand Loop Road in Mammoth. Minerva is reached in five minutes from the lower trailhead. The upper terrace drive is a separate one-way road above. Mammoth is the only Yellowstone area with paved road access through winter, and the white travertine reads especially well against snow. Stay on the boardwalk; the crust over the springs is thin.