North Platte River
— — the long river the snowpack lets go.
Not only on a wall.
“Seven hundred miles of cold water, born in the Park Range of Colorado and bending north through Wyoming before it turns east to find the plains. The tailwater stretches below Gray Reef Dam and Kortes carry some of the heaviest trout in the lower forty-eight. Above the reservoirs the river runs braided and shallow through sage country, and nobody is on it. — from the studio
North Platte River, 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.
The North Platte rises in Jackson County, Colorado, in the Park Range, and runs about 716 miles north into Wyoming, then east across western Nebraska, where it joins the South Platte at the city of North Platte to form the Platte River. It drains roughly 32,800 square miles. The Wyoming reach is broken by six dams—Seminoe, Kortes, Pathfinder, Alcova, Gray Reef, and Glendo—each holding back a reservoir and shaping a tailwater fishery below it.
Below Gray Reef Dam the river runs cold and clear at a regulated flow, and the eight miles down to the next bridge consistently rank among the highest fish-per-mile counts in the American West, with rainbow and brown trout that average well over eighteen inches. The Miracle Mile below Kortes Dam carries the same reputation. Both reaches fish best from October through May, when the crowds thin, the spawning runs move, and the canyon walls hold the morning light a long time.
Headwater flows rise sharply in late May and through June with the Park Range snowmelt, peaking near twelve thousand cubic feet per second at Casper before the dams release further downstream. Late summer is low and warm above the reservoirs, cold and steady below. Ice closes the high reaches by December most years, while the tailwaters stay open through winter. The cottonwood galleries along the floodplain turn yellow in the second week of October, almost on schedule.