Mirror Lake Snowy Range Scenic Byway
— — the peak doubled, the wind held its breath.
Not only on a wall.
“Mirror Lake sits just below Medicine Bow Peak, a short walk from a pull-off on Wyoming Highway 130. The byway only opens once the snowpack lets it, usually late May through October, so the season here is short and bright. When the surface is calm the quartzite cliffs rewrite themselves on the water, and the lake earns its name by accident. A loop trail wraps the shore in under a mile. Most cars drive past without stopping. The ones that stop tend to stay longer than they meant to. from the studio
Mirror Lake Snowy Range Scenic Byway, 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.
Mirror Lake lies along Wyoming Highway 130, the Snowy Range Scenic Byway, between Centennial and Saratoga in the Medicine Bow National Forest. The byway crosses the Snowy Range at Snowy Range Pass, the second-highest paved road in Wyoming, with sightlines to Medicine Bow Peak at 12,013 feet. The lake sits at roughly 10,400 feet of elevation, a short trail from the road. The full corridor was designated a National Scenic Byway in 1988. Heavy snowpack closes the high section of WY-130 most years from late October until late May, which makes the lake a summer and early-autumn place.
The Snowy Range is a quartzite uplift, and the high lakes here are small, cold, and very clear. Mirror Lake and its neighbour Lake Marie were carved by Pleistocene glaciers and are fed by snowmelt off Medicine Bow Peak. The bedrock is roughly 1.7 billion years old, some of the oldest exposed rock in the American Rockies. When the wind drops, usually in the first hour after sunrise, the surface flattens enough to reproduce the cliff line above almost stroke for stroke. By midmorning the alpine breeze comes up off the cirque and the mirror breaks.
WY-130 over the Snowy Range typically closes in late October and reopens in late May, depending on the year's snowpack. Even in July, snowfields linger on the north faces of Medicine Bow Peak and the Lakes Trail can hold drifts into early summer. The water temperature stays cold enough that swimming is rare and brief. Wildflowers, including alpine forget-me-not and Indian paintbrush, peak in mid-July through early August. Larches do not grow here, so the autumn turn is the gold of aspen lower on the byway and the bronze of dwarf willow at lake level, usually the last two weeks of September.