Our history here at Owl Peak studio, like our friend down the valley Martin Prechtel likes to say “starts somewhere in the middle”. Our teacher and visionary: the late and always great Padrino of the resurrected tradition of micaceous clay cookware in this Rio Las Tusas valley was Felipe Ortega. Felipe was said to have stumbled upon this life sustaining craft because he was borrowing his mother's old mica bean pot too often. He needed the pot to cook beans because he didn’t like the taste from other pots and so his mother sent him to go make one himself. After returning home to La Madera from not quite meeting the usual criterion for priesthood (although in most scholarly ways being of the most exemplary form) Felipe had come home in search of a way of life. Always an ebullient fountain of curiosity and resource El Maestro found a cultural and culinary treasure within his hands and dove wholeheartedly into the manufacture of these traditional bean and coffee pots with his almost 90 year old blind teacher from two villages up the road. Jesusita Martinez (pictured on the right) would pass away in only one year but would successfully nurture the legacy of this ailing tradition to sprout again down here in La Madera. Felipes studies took him to deeply remember the Jicarilla Apache contribution to the formation of both his own ancestry and and these Micaceous pots themselves and he begin to understand Micaceous clay, La Madera and the surrounding regions unique place in the cosmos of the universe of the New Mexico. The tradition had become little, built by only a few older people in New Mexico and almost orphaned but ancestrally it was grand, beloved and magnificent and used for millenia. He devoted his life to bringing micaceous clay in an integral form back to La Madera, back to the Jicarilla Apache Nation and in a new contemporary cookware form to a diverse audience of students and cooking enthusiasts as a lasting piece of utilitarian art. Felipe passed away too early and too quickly in 2018 but he left us all a lot of stuff to remember him by and keep doing (trust us it's a lot to keep this place up). Felipes studio at Owl Peak is continued by his Nephew Jimmy Ortega Jr,  and Felipes many students and apprentices. Today we strive to keep producing pottery, pass on our teachers techniques and legacy, manufacture clay, support the Indigenous and Hispaño traditions of micaceous clay pottery in this region, put cookware in peoples homes and keep this little place warm and bubbling away. Our various courses, workdays, lectures and apprenticeships all serve these same goals. May it always be deeply respected, loved and cooked in!