Yosemite Valley
— — the morning the granite turned gold and stayed.
Not only on a wall.
“Seven miles of glacier-carved granite on the Merced, with El Capitan rising 3,000 feet on the north wall and Half Dome closing the eastern end. Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 feet in three tiers, the tallest measured fall in North America. The valley first held federal protection in 1864, when Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant. A place that earns its silence at dawn, not noon.
Yosemite Valley, 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.
Yosemite Valley is a roughly seven-mile glacial trough at about 4,000 feet of elevation on the western slope of California's Sierra Nevada, carved by Pleistocene ice through granite of the Sierra Nevada Batholith. It sits within Yosemite National Park in Mariposa County, 195 miles east of San Francisco. The Merced River runs the floor; the walls rise vertically to nearly 5,000 feet above it at El Capitan. The valley received federal protection in 1864 when Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant, the first instance of the United States setting aside land specifically for preservation and public use.
El Capitan, the unbroken granite monolith on the north wall, rises about 3,000 feet from the valley floor and is one of the largest exposed granite faces on Earth. Half Dome, at the valley's eastern close, tops out at 8,839 feet, its rounded north face the remnant of a dome quartered by glacial plucking rather than the popular sheared-in-half story. Both are intrusions of the Cretaceous-era Sierra Nevada Batholith, exposed and shaped by successive Pleistocene glaciations that left the U-shaped floor and the hanging valleys above it.
Yosemite Falls plunges 2,425 feet in three tiers from the north rim — Upper Yosemite Fall at 1,430 feet, a middle cascade of 675 feet, and Lower Yosemite Fall at 320 feet — making it the tallest measured waterfall in North America. Bridalveil Fall on the south wall drops 620 feet near the valley's western entrance. Both are fed by snowmelt and run hardest in May and June, slow to a trickle by August, and often go dry by September before the autumn rains return any flow at all.