Gold Mine Hike at Mount Coot-tha, Brisbane, Australia

An old gold mining shaft at Mount Coot-tha.

Considering the COVID-19 travel restrictions at the moment, my ability to go on georneys (geological journeys) is very limited at the moment. However, here in Australia we are fortunate that we can still go outside for some recreation, as long as we stay close to home. We live close to Mount Coot-tha, a mountain with a beautiful forest reserve and botanic garden. Most weekends, I go for a hike with my husband and son on Mount Coot-tha. My son is 2 1/2, so we go on short hikes that are somewhere between 2 km and 5 km in total distance. Fortunately, there are plenty of great easy, short hiking trails at Mount Coot-tha.

One of our favorite hikes at Mount Coot-tha is along the Ghost Hole Track, which takes you past some old gold mine workings. At Mount Coot-tha, there is gold mineralization is located in small quartz-rich lenses that are located in meta-sedimentary rocks, specifically in the Bunya Phyllite and the Neranleigh-Fernvale Beds. The gold mineralization at Mount Coot-tha is not spectacular. However, there was intermittent gold mining on the mountain from the 1890s to the 1950s. Today, no gold prospecting or mining is permitted in the forest, but you can take a walk along an easy hiking trail to see an old gold mining shaft and some remnants of mining infrastructure. You can even have a picnic at the “Gold Mine Picnic Area”.

We really enjoy our little hikes through the former gold mining area. The forest is beautiful, and the remnants of gold mining and associated informational signs are interesting. The hike is perfect if you want an easy, but interesting, hike to go on with a toddler.

Below are some pictures of the hiking trail. Click on any of the pictures below to enlarge them.

Map showing the location of the picnic area and hiking trail.

A view of the trail through beautiful open eucalypt forest.

Remnants of a dam used for processing gold.

Another informational sign. Note that “yakka” is Australian slang for “hard work”. This mining certainly sounds like hard work!

Remnants of a wooden bridge used for trams.

The forest is really beautiful at Mount Coot-tha.

If you look up, there are sulphur-crested cockatoos in many of the trees.

You can see some lovely butterflies at Mount Coot-tha at certain times of year. Here’s a Blue Tiger Butterfly.

Admittedly, the gold mining infrastructure is not the most spectacular — there’s not much left. However, with the signs it nevertheless makes for an interesting little hike through a beautiful forest. I highly recommend it for a family hike.

Monday Geology Picture: Kolmanskop from Above

Kolmanskop from above #1, February 2015.

Apologies for the short hiatus in my blogging. I’ve been travelling and generally very busy with work these past two weeks. However, I have another “Geology Word of the Week” post coming up soon, so stay tuned!

Today I want to share another view of the abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop. I’m currently in Namibia for business, and I flew over Kolmanksop earlier today and managed to snap a few aerial pictures of the town with my phone. I previously visited Kolmanskop on the ground, and I shared some pictures here and here. However, I like these aerial views of Kolmanskop. They show the small buildings surrounded by a sea of sand, with the real sea sparkling blue on the horizon.

Kolmanksop from above #1, February 2015. — Kolmanksop from above #2, February 2015.

Kolmanskop from above #3, February 2015.

Monday Geology Picture: Sand Sign at Kolmanskop

An appropriate sign near Kolmanskop, Namibia. — A road sign near Kolmanskop, Namibia.

For this week’s “Monday Geology Picture” I’m sharing another picture from Kolmanskop, an abandoned diamond mining town in Namibia. Many of the buildings at Kolmanskop have been partially filled with sand. You can see more of my pictures from Kolmanskop here. When you drive along the paved road near Kolmanskop, you pass a roadside warning sign that says “Sand”. I suppose that the sign is warning drivers about sand covering the road or perhaps sandstorms creating poor visibility for driving, but when I saw the sign I thought that it was quite funny because it really states the obvious. Of course there is sand in the Namib Desert, especially at Kolmanskop!

Does anyone else have pictures of fun geologically themed roadsigns?

Kolmanskop in Pictures

Kolmanskop #1. Sitting on some sand in one of the abandoned houses.

Last month I spent some time in Namibia for work. During one of my days off, I was able to spend some time visiting Kolmanskop. Located in the Namib Desert a few miles outside of the seaside town of Lüderitz, Kolmanskop is a “Ghost Town” that is the remains of a former diamond mining town. Kolmanskop was founded shortly after diamonds were discovered in the region in 1908 and was abandoned to the elements in 1954, after the diamond supply was depleted. Over the last sixty years, Kolmanskop has been decaying in the desert, battered by the wind and swept over with sand. Today, many of the buildings are half-filled with sand. The discarded possessions of the town’s former inhabitants are either slowly disintegrating in the open air or are precariously protected by glass display cases. The town of Kolmanskop is managed as a tourist attraction by the diamond mining company Namdeb. Tourists can pay a fee to visit the town during certain hours. At their own risk, tourists can wander through the abandoned buildings.

Visiting Kolmanskop was a fascinating and surreal experience. As I explored the ghostly town, I felt keenly aware of the insignificance and ephemeral nature of my life. I wondered if, one day years from now, a young woman will wander through the decaying remains of my home… or perhaps come across a former possession of mine– maybe a book, with my name written on the front cover, dusty in the corner of an antique shop– and wonder, just for a moment, about the object’s former owner. Wandering through Kolmanskop, I found myself thinking about one of my favorite Carl Sagan quotations, from the book Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

With that quotation in mind, enjoy my pictures from Kolmanskop: