Sapphire Pool Biscuit Basin
— — the blue that came back after the earthquake.
Not only on a wall.
“A deep, clear hot spring on the boardwalk loop at Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone. Until 1959 it sat ringed by knobby geyserite biscuits, hence the name of the basin. The Hebgen Lake earthquake that August threw the pool into violent eruption and washed the biscuits away. What was left is the color: a still, vertical blue that holds the sky like a held breath. — from the studio
Sapphire Pool Biscuit Basin, 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.
Sapphire Pool sits in Biscuit Basin, a small thermal area on the western edge of Yellowstone's Upper Geyser Basin, about two miles north of Old Faithful along the Firehole River. A short boardwalk loop, roughly half a mile, links Sapphire with Jewel Geyser, Shell Spring, and the smaller features of the basin. The pool's water is near the boiling point at the surface and drops steeply into a clear vertical throat. Biscuit Basin lies within the Yellowstone Caldera, the active volcanic system that drives more than 10,000 thermal features across the park.
The blue comes from clean, very deep, very hot water. Sapphire holds little of the orange and yellow thermophile mat that rings cooler springs like Grand Prismatic, so the eye reads almost pure scattered blue light from the depth of the throat. The visible diameter is about 7.5 metres, and the pool is hot enough that its surface stays glass-still on most days. Photographers who arrive at sunrise sometimes find Sapphire mirroring the lodgepole pines around the basin so cleanly that the boardwalk railing seems to float on a second sky.
Biscuit Basin is reached from the Grand Loop Road two miles north of the Old Faithful area. The parking lot is small and fills early in summer; arriving before 9 a.m. usually finds a space. A footbridge crosses the Firehole River to the boardwalk, which runs an easy half-mile loop with no elevation gain. The basin closed for a stretch in 2024 after a hydrothermal explosion at Black Diamond Pool damaged sections of the walk; the National Park Service publishes current access status on the Yellowstone alerts page. Stay on the boardwalk; the ground around the pool is thin and unstable.