Getting into Hot Water Beach, New Zealand

A uniquely Kiwi experience, famous Hot Water Beach is on the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand's North Island.

Narnia Magic and Volcanic Rocks at Cathedral Cove, New Zealand

Te Whanganui-A-Hei (Cathedral Cove) Marine Reserve is on the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand's North Island. It may be familiar to an armchair traveler as the setting for opening scenes of the Narnia movie Prince Caspian, itself based loosely on C.S. Lewis' famous novel. It was one of the several stunning New Zealand locations for that film series.

Cathedral Cove. It's yet another one of my many favorite beaches. The surrounding, glaringly-white cliffs and sea stacks are composed of massive ignimbrite, composed of angular fragments of pumice in a fine matrix of rhyolitic ash, a type of silica-rich volcanic rock that is formed during explosive, violent eruptions. The immensity of these formations is evidence the landscape has changed many times, and it will change again, however timeless every moment in the cove might feel. There would be no tranquil, wide strand of fine, white sand without the violence of storms and volcano.

Yanchep's Blue Lagoon, Western Australia

The world has its share of beaches where the point is to be seen. Waikiki, Bondi, Ipanema – nature doesn't always provide the main scenery. But if you want to see some of the world's best beaches in solitude, there may be no better place than Western Australia, where your own private sandy paradise is only a short drive away from the capitol city of Perth. A family-friendly favorite of ours is the Yanchep Beach lagoon, just 56 kilometers (35 miles) north of the central business district.

Protected by a finger reef of gritty Tamala limestone that formed during the most recent ice age, water in the lagoon is no deeper than waist-high for the the average adult. The calm, turquoise waters are a perfect natural swimming pool for families with young children who are just learning to swim, particularly at the sheltered southern end of the main pool. There can be a strong current near the mouth of the inlet. Occasional schools of small fish will entertain young snorkellers. And, the clean white sand is an ideal playground for future architects armed with only a bucket, a plastic shovel and dreams. On a crowded summer day there will be no more than a handful of beach-goers.

Montjuïc to Montserrat -- Exploring Outwards and Upwards in Barcelona

On the morning of our second day in Barcelona we decided to explore outwards and upwards. 

Stretching between the port and city center, La Rambla is a broad, tree-lined avenue with a central walking arcade. La Rambla takes you into the heart of the city, but its southern terminus also spills you out to the port. La Rambla was easily accessed from our accommodation in the Barri Gotic (Gothic Quarter), and we strolled past many flower shops, cafes and souvenir vendors that were just opening around 8am on a Friday. We had several hours ahead of us before an afternoon excursion to Montserrat.

La Rambla

First stop was the statue of Columbus, on a pedestal towering above a roundabout at the southern terminus of La Rambla. True to form for a man who thought he'd found a shorter route to Asia, Cristoforo is pointing in the wrong direction, south. Perhaps he's showing all the new immigrants to Spain the way back? There are sculptures on the base, with historical scenes depicting newly reverent indigenous Americans gratefully welcoming their benevolent colonizers.

Harborside at Grand Marais on Lake Superior - Photo Essay

Good things come in small packages. With a population of only 1,340 that’s nestled between the rugged Sawtooth Range and massive Lake Superior, Grand Marais was dubbed “America’s Coolest Small Town” by Budget Travel Magazine for 2015 and was named a Top 100 Adventure Town by National Geographic Adventure Magazine. The city has a fishing heritage that’s reminiscent of New England and the Canadian Maritimes, and local whitefish is a staple on most menus. Today, Grand Marais is a mainstay of summer tourism on Lake Superior's north shore, and one of the region's vibrant artist's colonies.

The deep, open waters of the greatest lake always stay cold, and their interaction with warm, humid summer air commonly makes for dramatic shoreline fogs in the area of the harbor. If that doesn’t cool you down, there is the excellent frozen custard at Sydney’s, popular with families on summer holiday.

Hawai'i's Akaka Falls - Beautiful and Accessible

The 422-foot (129 meter) tall Akaka Falls on Hawaii's Big Island may be the State's most iconic, a single spectacular drop into a steep, bowl-shaped gorge, in steaming jungle that lushly evokes primeval paradise.

A Day in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park

Volcanoes. For a geologist they are the driving reason to visit Hawai'i. Along with dinosaurs (paleontology), volcanoes are one of the specialized fields of study where my profession intersects with coolness. My 8-year-old son prepared for our visit by watching an episode of the Magic School Bus, which raised me in his professional esteem. While my wife did most of the planning for our Hawai'i vacation, for Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park I possessively set the itinerary. 

Our first stop was logically at the Kīlauea Visitor Center, about an hour's climbing drive (45 km) from Hilo. It's an important first stop where rangers convey current park conditions. It is also a good place to purchase a jacket or hooded sweatshirt. Cold-weather apparel isn't on the priority packing list for most vacationers in tropical paradise, but moist air rising from the sea can make even the moderate elevations around Kīlauea (4000 ft or 1220 m) bone-chillingly damp. The visitor center gift shop does brisk business in rain gear and warm clothes, at prices that would make an exclusive vendor of water in the desert blush.

Picture of the Moment: Split Rock Lighthouse, Silver Bay, Minnesota

Split Rock Lighthouse, located in a state park of the same name near Silver Bay, is one of the most photographed spots in the State of Minnesota and a National Historic Landmark. Beyond is the massive Lake Superior, which contains approximately 10% of the liquid fresh water on Earth. Situated on a dramatic vertical cliff of diabase (shallowly emplaced intrusive igneous rock) about 130 feet (40 m) above the north shore of the lake, the lighthouse was built in response to the great Mataafa storm of November, 1905 that claimed 29 ships on Superior. Split Rock is widely considered one of the most beautiful lights in the United States, and the park is very popular with tourists during the summer months.

Framed prints of the light are a staple amongst local professional photographers. This unprofessional photo was taken just southwest of the lighthouse from a scenic viewpoint turn-off.

The lighthouse was retired in 1969, but still puts out a light annually in commemoration of the famous 1975 wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Split Rock Lighthouse is an easy hour's drive northeast from Duluth, Minnesota on the scenic State Highway 61.

Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park - still a place of refuge

We were in Hawai'i for volcanoes, sun and sand. An historic site we'd never heard of was a bit of an afterthought. Wasn't the indigenous stone-age culture, after all, largely pre-historic, even if recent by global standards? What records of the old ways could be left but for a few petroglyphs and the oral tradition? Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park wiped away my preconceptions and was one of the most educational and enjoyable excursions of our Hawai'i vacation.

Located on the southern shore of Honaunau Bay and sprawled over 420 acres, Pu'uhonua o Honaunau is a journey back into Hawaiian antiquity. The site was at once a royal grounds and a place of refuge for losers in war, civilians during wartime and breakers of kapu, or sacred laws (think "taboo"). Breaking kapu was an almost certain death sentence. The perpetrator's only chance was to evade pursuers hot on his heels and make it to the safety of a pu'uhonua (sacred place of refuge) by sea or land. Once there the penitent law-breaker was free to rejoin civil society after a ceremony of absolution performed by the kahuna pule (priest). The visiting Catholic will have a good appreciation of the place.

A First Day on O'ahu

Renting a car and exploring at your own pace is the best way to see any of the main islands in Hawai'i. The aloha spirit isn't the polished clockwork of a German village. Behind the tourist facade, many countryside residences are rustic and a little bit weatherbeaten, much like the islands' ancient volcanoes themselves. This is a place where people actually live and pay taxes, not just play in a Disneyfied paradise. And, scheduled excursions are the antithesis of island life. Still, a little planning can maximize your adventure and comfort. 

Honolulu on O'ahu is sprawling, and traffic can be congested. There are a lot of one-way streets, so a GPS or your mobile phone map app will be invaluable. I'll swear the freeway lanes are narrower than I'm used to on the mainland. I was constantly running over the lane-side (warning) rumble strips, which at least kept my wife alert. One good thing, when you leave the city to explore in the morning and return in the afternoon, you will be going against the flow of rush hour traffic.

Maybe this is your first full day in Hawai'i, and you find yourself bright-eyed and ready to go in the darkness of 5:00 am? This was our condition on our first morning. An early morning climb in the crater of Diamond Head was the perfect way to offset the effects of jet lag.

Photo Essay - Valley of the Winds Walk at Kata Tjuta

There's another whole aspect of the Red Centre in central Australia besides the iconic Ayer's Rock. The name Kata Tjuta may not have the musical quality of Uluru, and even the English designation, "Olgas," is suggestive of an ugly stepmother. The Pitjantjatjara phrase Kata Tjuta means "many heads," and there are 36 of these steep domes of bald rock an hour's drive west of Uluru, in Australia's Northern Territory.

But the Valley of the Winds loop walk (7.4 km) at Kata Tjuta is an equally spectacular alternative to Uluru, without the crowds. It should not be missed by any visitor to this jewel of Australia blessed with the physical capability. We went on one of only a handful of overcast days in any given year, but the site of monolithic domes shrouded in morning mist is its own unique experience.

Pictures of the Moment - A What Kind of Pavement?

"A what kind of pavement?" I asked the unresponsive travel guidebook as we continued our drive tour along the eastern coast of Tasmania.

Tessellated pavement pans, Eaglehawk Neck, Tasmania. Farther from the shoreline than the "loafs" (below) evaporating water leaves salt deposits that more readily corrode softer, more weakly-cemented sandstone of the concave pans than the relatively resistant joint filling between them.

In architectural terms, Encyclopaedia Brittanica defines "tessellated" or mosaic pavement (also known as floor mosaic) as interior or exterior floor covering composed of varicolored stone tesserae (Latin: “dice”), cubes, or tiles of other geometry closely fitted together in simple or complex designs with a durable grout or cement. Think of the courtyard mosaics of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Photo Essay - Storming Castle Hill, New Zealand

The indigenous Ngāi Tahu people named this place Kura Tawhiti, treasure of a distant land. Later European settlers, reminded of towering battlements, called it Castle Hill. It is well named in either case. Situated on the spine of New Zealand's South Island, south of Arthur's Pass, Castle Hill is still a high-country sheep station. But amoeboid, stony marbles crisply framed against a steely blue sky, it is also an otherworldly karst landscape of tumbling limestone boulders and tors rising from the rolling, grassy turf.

Picture of the Moment - Follow the Yellow Brick Road

When you come across a sign for the Yellow Brick Road, you follow it. We didn't see any munchkins, and these Oz friends are obviously disguised as homo sapiens from the "Red Green Show," but we did see a little bit of gold over the rainbow. And I discovered an affectation for show tune choreography.

Looking westward, in the far distance you can see the headframe of the David Bell gold mine. A staking rush after discovery of the Hemlo Gold Camp in the early 1980s was Canada's largest since the Klondike. Taxes from locally-derived gold bricks have paved plenty of roads in the thirty years since. I visited here in September, 1994 as a stowaway with the Queen's University Minex program's annual field trip to major ore deposits of the Canadian Shield.

While the rest of the group were busy looking at rocks, three friends and I organized an impromptu homage to a different kind of treasure. If memory and character placement serve, I'm the Scarecrow on the far left. The other two gentlemen were Best Man and a groomsman at my wedding two years later. I've only bumped into "Dorothy" once in the ensuing twenty years. The name of the poor photographer is lost to history.

The Yellow Brick Road is located near the Hemlo gold camp, about 55 km east of Marathon, off the Trans-Canada Highway (17), halfway between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

Moeraki Boulders - Crystalline Eggs Hatch Beautiful Birds?

Giant eggs that hatch fabulous women? Gourds or eel baskets washed from an ancient canoe of the gods? Marbles lost by some young giant?

The truth is even more interesting. The Moeraki Boulders--located 40 kilometers south of Oamaru on New Zealand's Otago coast--are calcite-cemented "septarian concretions" exposed through weathering of the surrounding, softer mudstone in low cliffs behind the beach, then concentrated by wave action. They are one of the top free natural landmarks in New Zealand.

Photo Essay - Champagne Pool, New Zealand

Taupo volcanic zone, New Zealand, where fresh air smells like passed wind. The Waiotapu geothermal field, near Rotorua is both a beautiful natural landmark of the North Island and a malodorous laboratory for economic geologists who want to see a mineral deposit in the making. And, it is a well-studied location for the biology of extremophile (microbial) organisms.

Algae aren't quite extremophiles, but they evince the primordial soup, where such things were the pinnacle of life on earth for billions of years.

Some baths are a little too hot for comfort. Frequently depicted in guidebooks, Champagne Pool is perhaps the most striking geothermal feature of Wai-o-tapu thermal wonderland. Alkaline springs within its explosive crater are framed by a brilliant orange, silica sinter rim that is colored by arsenic- and antimony-bearing sulfide minerals being deposited today. No wonder this area of the park is named "The Artist's Palette." But with waters hovering above 70 degrees Celsius, a quick dip in the pool would be your last.

Ironically, if the park were an industrial area, heavy metal concentrations in the water would be high enough to attract environmental protests and lawyers. People want to come here. It was possibly the place that hit the most notes for the most people on our trip to New Zealand.

This same view is essentially the cover of Fodor's New Zealand (2006).

Pictures of the Moment - Highlights of Big Nickel, Sudbury

The largest city in northern Ontario, Sudbury is a city of superlatives.

I'm in town for a few short days on a business trip to Laurentian University.

One of the local features I immediately sought out was a first hand view of shatter cones resulting from an extraterrestrial impact approximately 1.85 billion years ago. These horsetail-shaped, shock-related geological structures only form in bedrock proximal to meteorite craters or underground nuclear explosions, radiating outward from the source of the shock-wave in concentric patterns. The Sudbury Basin is the erosional remnant of such an impact crater, the second largest on Earth. A catastrophic global-change event even larger than that responsible for the Chicxulub crater in Yucatán, Mexico (which is widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs), the Sudbury impact was directly responsible for the metal-rich impact melt that now makes Sudbury one of the word's largest mining centers. Mines of nickel and lesser copper have operated continuously since the beginning of the 20th Century.

Picture of the Moment -- There's Gold in Them Hills, but Not in This Pan

Just moments before a flash of temper, a gold prospector realizes he's been skunked. But everyone is guaranteed to find a little color at Big Thunder Gold Mine in Keystone, South Dakota, even if Dad has to give a little help.

Seconds later this little prospector tossed his gold pan in frustration. Stubbornness is a virtue among gold panners, and prospecting is not the profession of the impatient. But few people got rich during the great gold rushes of the 19th century and early 20th century. The real money was made by the people that supplied food, equipment and the staples--blue jeans, bullets, booze and burlesque. The demotivational poster was created using a tool on Despair.com.

The 1892-vintage Big Thunder mine is a great place to try your hand at panning on the front porch or in nearby Battle Creek, and if you don't strike it rich there's always the ice cream. And you won't strike it rich, even with gold at $1300/oz.

The site includes a mining museum, gift shops and option of a tour of the underground workings, where all mine visitors get a free sample of gold ore. We visited the beautiful Black Hills a couple times (2004, 2006) for a western-themed family camping, and gold panning at a variety of locations was a highlight for the kids. These tourist sites are "seeded," as it is very rare to find any color in the played-out surroundings (and still productive sites are probably over private claims), but the process is much the same as in the 1870s.

The nearby Homestake Gold Mine in Lead was the deepest gold mine in North America when it closed in 2002 after producing approximately 40 million ounces of gold over 126 years, one of the continent's biggest single lodes.

Pictures of the Moment - Muddy Mats of Algae are a Tourist Attraction in Western Australia

Modern stromatolites living in Hamelin Pool, in the Shark Bay world heritage site, Western Australia. Photo taken April, 2008. These layered mounds of mud and algae are a nirvana for geologists on holiday.

Single-celled organisms, the cyanobacteria of Hamelin Pool are descended from the oldest known forms of photosynthetic life on Earth. A scene like this would have framed the pinnacle of the food chain over three billion years ago.

The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines a stromatolite (strō-māt'l-īt') as a generally dome-shaped structure consisting of alternating laminations of carbonate or silicate sediment and fossilized algal mats. Layered stromatolites are produced over time by the trapping, binding, or precipitating of sediment by groups of microorganisms, primarily cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) growing in shallow-water biofilms. They are distributed throughout the world in the early fossil record and represent some of the oldest recognized forms of life, from over three billion years ago. Similar organic structures continue to form today in restricted hypersaline environments, especially in Western Australia.

Fossilized digital (finger-like) stromatolites from the Biwabik Iron Formation of the Mesabi Iron Range (approximately 2 billion years old), LTV Steel iron mine, Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota. These stromatolites are anchored in an oxidation zone (red jasper), but grew upward into an anaerobic zone (black). Spaces between the stromatolites are filled with round green oncolites, black magnetite crytals and siderite. Thin vertical cracks/fissures are filled with bituminous anthraxolite.

Living stromatolites are rare. The only other known marine location for modern, living stromatolites outside Western Australia is in the Bahamas. Modern stromatolites require hypersaline water, an environment that is inhospitable for their primary predator (a snail). Not far from Hamelin Pool, in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, are fossils of stromatolites over 3.5 billion years old, the earliest easily-recognizable fossils on Earth.

The Hamelin Pool Marine Nature Reserve is located adjacent to the Hamelin Pool Telegraph Station, about 30 kilometers (19 mi) west of the Overlander Roadhouse on the North West Coastal Highway of Western Australia (Wikipedia). Access is via Hamelin Pool Road and then through the telegraph station grounds. There is no charge for access.