Split Rock Sweetwater Oregon Trail
— — the notch the wagons aimed at for a week.
Not only on a wall.
“A cleft granite ridge above the Sweetwater River, with a clean V-shaped gunsight cut into its crest. Emigrant diaries from the 1840s and 1850s describe steering by it for days at a time, the notch holding steady on the horizon as the oxen worked west. The river runs slow at its base, willow and sage along the banks. The trail ruts are still legible on the south side, and the cleft still does what it always did — pulls the eye, and the road, toward South Pass. — from the studio
Split Rock Sweetwater Oregon Trail, 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.
Split Rock is a granite ridge in the Granite Mountains of central Wyoming, about 75 miles west of Casper along U.S. Highway 287. Its summit carries a deep, clean V-notch that is visible to travelers in the Sweetwater valley from roughly two days east to one day west — a span of about 50 miles along the historic trail corridor. The river runs along the southern base of the ridge at around 6,300 feet, and the site is a National Historic Landmark for its role as one of the trail's most reliable bearings.
The ridge is composed of Precambrian granite, part of the Granite Mountains uplift that pushed through the surrounding sedimentary plains. The notch itself appears to be a joint-controlled erosional feature, where two near-vertical fracture planes intersected and weathered out faster than the surrounding rock. The result is a clean, dark cleft against the sky, sharp enough that wagon captains and Pony Express riders used it as a heading for days. The Bureau of Land Management manages the land around it as part of the Sweetwater River corridor.
The Split Rock interpretive pullout sits on the north side of U.S. 287 between Muddy Gap and Jeffrey City, with a small parking area and panels explaining the trail's path. From the pullout the notch sits to the south above the Sweetwater. There is no maintained trail to the summit. The site is exposed and shadeless; midsummer afternoons get hot and the wind is constant. The drive between Casper and Lander is the standard way to reach it, and the Mormon Handcart Historic Site at Martin's Cove is roughly 10 miles east.