Pete Tillman
SPLASH + flying seaweed! Estero Bluffs SP
Beautiful morning and Big Surf against the trademark bluffs on my favorite (and rather precarious) trail in this park, a few miles N of Cayucos. Best wave catch of numerous tries this time.
Geology: chert cliffs. Radiolarian chert = deepwater marine, formed very far from here, scraped off the top of the descending Pacific plate as it pushed its way under the NAm plate, back when it did {= don't remember when). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolarite is a common rock in the Calif Franciscan fm. It's one of the few competent rocks around here, so was extensively quarried for gravel/road metal. There's a fair-size (abandoned) quarry on the hill behind these bluffs. Not much to see inside it if you walk up, though the hilltop monument is a popular lookout & photo-op.
If you visit: be very careful of crumbling/sluffing edges on the blufftops! It's been raining, and is this AM, hooray. We need it!
SPLASH + flying seaweed! Estero Bluffs SP
Beautiful morning and Big Surf against the trademark bluffs on my favorite (and rather precarious) trail in this park, a few miles N of Cayucos. Best wave catch of numerous tries this time.
Geology: chert cliffs. Radiolarian chert = deepwater marine, formed very far from here, scraped off the top of the descending Pacific plate as it pushed its way under the NAm plate, back when it did {= don't remember when). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolarite is a common rock in the Calif Franciscan fm. It's one of the few competent rocks around here, so was extensively quarried for gravel/road metal. There's a fair-size (abandoned) quarry on the hill behind these bluffs. Not much to see inside it if you walk up, though the hilltop monument is a popular lookout & photo-op.
If you visit: be very careful of crumbling/sluffing edges on the blufftops! It's been raining, and is this AM, hooray. We need it!