Joseph sits at the foot of Wallowa Lake under the Eagle Cap peaks, a ranching town named for the Nez Perce leader whose band was driven from this valley. Its second life began in 1982, when a few local sculptors suggested to a resident that a foundry close by would make their work far easier, and Valley Bronze opened as a small art-casting shop with fewer than a dozen employees. In 1987 it added a monument building tall enough to cast larger-than-life pieces, and the town became known well beyond the valley for art casting.
Art foundries like these work by the lost-wax method: a sculptor's original is molded, copied in wax, coated in ceramic, and the wax melted out so molten bronze can fill the space it leaves, after which the pieces are welded, chased and given their patina. Valley Bronze runs a gallery on Main Street and offers foundry tours.
Main Street itself is the showroom. From the late 1990s Joseph rebuilt it with cobblestone sidewalks and buried the power lines that blocked the mountain view, and by 2002 it had set seven monumental bronzes of Western subjects along the street, now the Bronze Art Walk. From town it is a short drive to Wallowa Lake, with Old Joseph's grave at its foot, and a longer one east to the Imnaha and the Hells Canyon overlooks.
The closest stops worth working into your route