Stonehammer UNESCO Global Geopark

Well into the afternoon of June 7th, most of the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Saint John, New Brunswick, we detoured into the little village of Saint Martins. There we stumbled upon the Stonehammer UNESCO Global Geopark. A couple of motorcycle riders close to where I’d walked onto the beach to take pictures told me that at high tide—this is the Bay of Fundy, after all—the caves get partly submerged. Below is a closer look at one of the cave entrances; you can see that the water had already risen enough to prevent people from staying dry if they walked to the cave.

For more information, click the following plaque to enlarge it and make the text legible:

Me being me, I photographed not just on the grander scale of the cave-bearing cliffs but also more closely:

Doesn’t that round rock near the center make you think it could almost pass for a planet?

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

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Looking up at Hopewell Rocks

You’ve already seen picturesque rocks and peeling tree trunks from Hopewell Rocks, New Brunswick, on June 7th. At one point I looked up from the shore there and saw this prismatic band running across the clouds.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

More than rocks at Hopewell Rocks

As impressive as the rock formations are at New Brunswick’s Hopewell Rocks, on the trail down from the parking lot to the shore I had to stop and photograph some trees with peeling bark, presumably birches.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Hopewell Rocks

In the recent post entitled “The Bay of Fundy,” the first photograph looked out over the water from a place called Hopewell Rocks. That spot is a popular destination due to its bayside rock formations made all the more picturesque by the great rising and falling of the tides. Below are six of the photographs I took at Hopewell Rocks on June 7th.

 

 

 

 

 

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

The Bay of Fundy

The Bay of Fundy, which lies between New Brunswick and western Nova Scotia, is famous for having the world’s greatest difference in sea level between low tide and high tide, as much as 50 ft. With such rapid rising and falling every day, the water can get pretty muddy. That’s apparent in the first photograph, a view looking out from Hopewell Rocks, New Brunswick, a few minutes before noon on June 7. By then the fog over the land across an arm of the Bay was rapidly lifting; soon the clouds had dissipated.

The next morning, in Saint John, New Brunswick, we witnessed a strange phenomenon. People describe rivers as flowing downstream, with the down meaning literally from a higher elevation to a lower one, due to gravity. The Saint John River also flows from greater elevation to lower elevation, but as high tide approaches, the water surging in from the Bay of Fundy rises so much that the river reverses and the water temporarily flows in the direction we would normally call upstream. That’s what you see in the second photograph, where the river was flowing from the left, which is conventionally downstream, to the right, which is conventionally upstream.

Here’s a plaque that tells more about the strange and occasionally deadly phenomenon:

On a lighter note, I can’t resist saying that, photographically speaking, the Bay of Fundy makes for a bay of fun day.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman