Titcomb Basin
— — the alpine the long walk in earns.
Not only on a wall.
“Twelve miles in from Elkhart Park, past Photographers Point and Island Lake, the trail opens into a long granite trench held between Fremont Peak and Mount Sacagawea. Two narrow lakes run the floor of the basin. Almost no one drives to it; almost everyone who reaches it sleeps a night.
Titcomb 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.
Titcomb Basin sits in the northern Wind River Range, inside the Bridger Wilderness of Bridger-Teton National Forest. The walk-in from Elkhart Park trailhead near Pinedale runs roughly twelve to fifteen miles depending on the route through Seneca, Island, and Hobbs Lakes. The basin is walled by Fremont Peak at 13,745 feet, Mount Sacagawea, Mount Helen, and Mount Woodrow Wilson. Lower and Upper Titcomb Lakes lie on the floor at about 10,400 feet. Dinwoody and Knife Point Glaciers cling to the cirques behind the divide.
At 10,400 feet the air thins enough to slow most newcomers. Storms build fast over the divide most summer afternoons, and the basin holds them; weather rolls in from the south down the trench and out the north end toward Indian Pass. Nights drop below freezing through July. The Continental Divide runs the eastern ridgeline, separating the Green River drainage from the Wind, which is why every drop of meltwater that leaves the basin reaches a different ocean.
The basin is reachable from roughly mid-July through late September. Snow holds on Indian Pass and Bonney Pass into July most years; aspens in the lower trail miles turn the second week of September. Backcountry permits are not required in the Bridger Wilderness, but groups are capped at fifteen people and stock parties must camp on durable surfaces. The closest road, the Skyline Drive to Elkhart Park, is plowed only as far as Half Moon Lake in winter.