More pillow basalt at Rodeo Cove – Magma Cum Laude

I promised photos of the second part of my trip to see pillow basalts at the Marin Headlands, and here we are, just as the fog was lifting in the early afternoon. After exploring the Point Bonita lighthouse and its vicinity, we decided to hike down through the abundant succulents (Carpobrotus edulis, if I’ve got it right) to Rodeo Cove and its beach.

A typical west coast scene with succulents providing the greenery

On the beach, we were treated to some lovely ‘fresh’ pillow basalts that have been eroded by wave action. In some cases, the erosion has actually emphasized the curves of the pillows.

More pillows!

There was a lot more mineralization in the interstitial spaces in this exposure – maybe something like calcite?

Mineralization surrounding the pillows

Here you can see some of the overlying outcrop, which is pretty oxidized.

A little further up the beach I found this neat example of a pillow weathering into little chunks that looked like jointing, but probably aren’t.

Crunchy pillow

A closer look at the crunchy pillow

The tide was just going out and made it much easier to get up onto the rocks.

Scenery

But there were also lovely exposures in the cliffs directly behind us, where you could also see the transition to the overlying cherts.

Wall o’ pillows

While exploring one of the outcrops made accessible by low tide, we found these lovely slickensides:

Slick slicks

Hannah obligingly took a brief nap on a pillow:

Good for napping

And Drew posed with some particularly ropy-looking specimens:

Pillow fort?

Down here it was easy to see what had been (relatively) recently exposed by erosion, and what had been sitting out in the elements weathering for a while. The color contrasts aren’t quite as dramatic as they were up on the cliffs, but they’re still pretty clear.

Weathered and fresh pillows

All in all, it was a lovely day for a walk on the beach amid the former ocean floor eruptive features – and we weren’t done looking at deep-sea rocks just yet!

Sea stacks