St Elmo ghost town Sawatch Range Ceramic Art Tile

A nineteenth-century mining town at the end of Chaffee County Road 162, above the Chalk Creek drainage in the Sawatch Range. Most of the buildings are still standing: town hall, general store, miners' cabins, a small schoolhouse. The dry mountain air at almost ten thousand feet keeps the wood the way nothing else could. The railroad that built it pulled out in 1922 and never came back. In summer the road fills with day-trippers and the chipmunks own the porches. By October the road closes and the town goes quiet again until June.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.