Tongue River Canyon
— — limestone walls cut by a small river with a long temper.
Not only on a wall.
“The Tongue River drops out of the Bighorns through a narrow limestone gorge a few miles above the town of Dayton. The walls run several hundred feet of grey-white rock, pocketed with caves. Climbers know the canyon for its sport routes; anglers know it for the brown trout in the pools below the rapids.
Tongue River Canyon, 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.
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The place, in three passes.
Tongue River Canyon sits on the eastern slope of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming, inside Bighorn National Forest. The river drops out of the high country through a four-mile gorge of Madison limestone before reaching the town of Dayton at the canyon mouth. Walls rise roughly seven hundred feet at the deepest sections. The canyon road follows the river to the trailhead for the Tongue River Trail, which climbs about a thousand feet over five miles toward the high meadows on Bald Mountain.
The walls are Madison Formation limestone, laid down in a warm shallow sea roughly 340 million years ago. Tongue River Cave, the longest in Wyoming at over a mile of mapped passage, opens partway up the south wall and is gated and managed by the Forest Service. Climbers have established more than two hundred routes on the cleaner faces, most of them sport climbs on grey-white pocketed limestone. The rock holds heat in summer and shade in winter equally well.
The Tongue runs cold and clear through the canyon most of the year, fed by snowmelt off the Bighorns. Brown trout and rainbow trout hold in the pools below the rapids; the lower river above Dayton is a popular wade-fishing stretch. Spring runoff usually peaks in late May and early June, when the river runs high and brown and the canyon road can flood at the lower bridges. By midsummer the flow drops, the pools clear, and the cottonwoods along the banks turn gold by late September.