North Platte River Encampment
— — a small valley where the river slows.
Not only on a wall.
“A town of fewer than five hundred people on the upper North Platte, where the river bends out of the Sierra Madre and slows into pools that hold brown trout through the summer. The Grand Encampment Museum keeps the old copper-mining buildings on the original block at the south end of town. Most afternoons the wind comes up from the south and nobody hurries. — from the studio
North Platte River Encampment, 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.
Encampment sits in Carbon County in south-central Wyoming, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre range, at roughly 7,323 feet of elevation. The town grew up around the Ferris-Haggarty copper mine in 1897 and the sixteen-mile aerial tramway that carried ore down to the smelter at Encampment. The 2020 census recorded 429 residents. The Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest begins at the western edge of town, and the upper North Platte runs through the valley a mile north of the courthouse.
The North Platte at Encampment is a freestone river above the reservoirs, fed by snowmelt out of the Sierra Madre and the Park Range across the Colorado line. The float water from town down to Saratoga is one of the most consistent brown and rainbow trout fisheries in Wyoming, with hatch counts that hold from June through October. Wyoming Game and Fish manages the upper stretch as a wild-trout water with no stocking, and posts a slot limit on browns through the public-access reaches.
The Grand Encampment Museum keeps fourteen of the original mining-camp buildings on a single block at the south end of town, open daily from Memorial Day through the end of September. Cabin tours are free; the transportation barn holds the surviving section of the sixteen-mile tramway. Saratoga Hot Springs lies nineteen miles north on Highway 130, a free year-round public soak. The closest commercial airport is Laramie, about two hours east over the Snowy Range.