Another opportunity has been seized to escape from the drudgery that is cruising boat ownership, and the VS team have again headed north but this time not quite so far, and by car. As it turned out, geology was the main highlight of the week away. And what a range was seen.

First up were The Pinnacles in a national park a mere 200km north of Perth. Here they are:

This is an amazing landscape. Almost flat and covered in windblown sand. The sand is heavy with lime and readily sets into limestone of varying degrees of hardness. There is a lot of sand, with active bare dunes kilometres inland. These pinnacles were almost unknown until late in the twentieth century. The land is inhospitable, unsuitable for farming and shunned by the aborigines for religious reasons. And until the recent arrival of sealed roads (the coast access road, the Indian Ocean Drive, was sealed less than five years ago) almost inaccessible. Now it’s a tourist mecca with a smart new Visitor Centre and toilets; a quite amazing change in a generation.

Here is your hero, trying to look happy (he is). Unfortunately he looks more like an entrant for a gurning competition, and one with a good chance of winning:

The Pinnacles are geologically recent at about 500 000 years. It is thought they originated from water penetration down the roots of terrestrial vegetation which caused the lime-rich sands to coagulate and set into sandstone. At some stage the vegetation disappeared, possibly in a catastrophic fire, and the newly naked sand blew away exposing the Pinnacles. It is even possible that this happened very recently - the sparse records of early European visits make no mention of them, even the Dutch explorers mapping the coast three hundred years ago (the Pinnacles are visible from the sea nowadays). A lovely spot, full of interest. And even a tourist mecca in WA can be enjoyed almost on your own as the photos show.