Pine Bluffs prairie
— — the grass the wind has been combing for a long time.
Not only on a wall.
“Pine Bluffs sits where Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado almost meet, a town of about a thousand on the high shortgrass plains east of Cheyenne. The bluffs themselves are low limestone shoulders above the prairie, the kind of rise you don't notice from the interstate until you climb one. Plains Indians camped on the High Plains Archaeology dig site here for at least nine thousand years; the University of Wyoming has been working it since 1981. The wind moves the grass the way water moves over a slow river bottom. from the studio
Pine Bluffs prairie, 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.
Pine Bluffs is a town in eastern Laramie County, Wyoming, on Interstate 80 right at the Nebraska state line. The 2020 census counted 1,118 residents at an elevation of 5,047 feet. The town takes its name from the limestone bluffs that rise just south of the railroad and the interstate, the easternmost outliers of the high plains that climb west toward Cheyenne. The country around it is shortgrass prairie: blue grama and buffalograss, antelope, meadowlarks, and the BNSF mainline running through the middle of town.
The High Plains east of the Laramie Range are some of the quietest country in the continental United States outside the Mountain West proper. There are no large rivers, no impoundments, no major highways besides I-80, and the next town of any size east is Kimball, Nebraska, about thirteen miles away. At night the only sound on the bluffs is wind through the bunchgrass and the occasional freight train working the BNSF grade up out of the North Platte drainage. The sky is dark enough to read constellations west of the Milky Way.
The High Plains Archaeology Site on the south edge of town has been worked by the University of Wyoming since 1981 and holds evidence of human presence going back roughly nine thousand years. The visitor centre is open seasonally in summer, with active dig units viewable behind glass. Pine Bluffs Trail Days runs each September around the railroad and the historic main street; the rodeo and the county fair run earlier in the summer. Winters are cold and dry, with the wind that has made this stretch of Wyoming famous among long-haul drivers.