Traprock Pottery is made by area native Dennis Sotala and his wife Leslie. His father John immigrated to the Keweenaw as a small boy from Finland, and worked in the Quincy Mine and farmed. His mother, also Finnish, was born in a log cabin in Lac La Belle to a rag rug weaver and a commercial fisherman. Dennis’s winter studio overlooks the Traprock Valley, about thirty miles from Copper Harbor in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Traprock is a dark volcanic rock, a type of basalt, which is seen along the shores of the Keweenaw Peninsula.
