Aquinnah

My excursion out to Cape Poge took a little longer than I had planned, so I had to race to get to the west end of the island before the sun set. My plans for a long walk on the beach below the bluffs at Gay Head were thwarted by coming darkness, but the view from above was still impressive. And there was no one else there.

Gay Head is an unusual glacial moraine composed of Cretaceous sedimentary rocks (80-100 million years old) thrust upward by the advancing glacier during the Pleistocene. Which makes a pretty neat story, though it sounds like this place also holds many other interesting geologic stories (but none that I was able to deduce from my brief visit). The boulders on the beach below the bluffs are derived from till on the surface. The cobble berm on the beach to the south would also have been fun to spend more time exploring. Sand dunes behind, cobbles on the berm and being pushed into the dune grass, and a sandy beach.