HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCE

The Mountain has nine geoheritage sites, with four of these being Geo-Cultural Heritage Places too. MAP

# 2 The Organ Pipes

A spectacular example of an exposed large-scale columnar dolerite “sill” whose fluted columns and deep couloirs start a kilometre above sea-level and stretch for over a kilometre from the southern-most University Buttress to the Northern Buttress. The inspiration of a hundred artists and graphic-designers, the goal for 500 different ascents. The Pipes are a cultural icon.

# 6 THE POTATO fields

The extensive fields and streams and standing and fallen tors on talus slopes, the potato fields, ski drifts, and toppling columns along the eastern escarpment, are numerous and have provoked awe and joy in every generation.

# 7 The Rocking Stone

An enormous boulder just off the Ice House Track to The Pinnacle famous for its ability—on a plinth and balanced at an unlikely—to be rocked a few inches each way, making it the world’s heaviest walnut crush.

All three of these feature dolerite. The stone itself is named dolerite (from doleros meaning deceptive, difficult to identify). Charles Darwin used the common term of his day, greenstone. Nowadays, we use bluestone. In old texts the mountain’s tors were said to be basaltic: the process where exposed magma cools into stone, but the contemporary scientific explanation is that they are upthrust magma that cooled under the surface into five-sided singles. Later exposed to harsh alpine conditions, their facets weathered round. The tors are also windshields, their eastern faces sheltering plants, their northerly facets basking places and the ceilings for an horstrophic eco-system dominated by the Wellington Predatory Bug.

# 8 Disappearing Tarn

A very unusually tinted ephemeral natural pond which can suddenly arise in the boulder stream of Snake Plains Creek. It may reach up to six metres at its deepest point, but only after heavy rain, only to disappear almost as quickly as it appeared. Generally, of a coolish temperature.

# 9 The pure WaterS

The purity of the waters of the Park are of outstanding significance for their role as wildlife habitat, as well as for the retention of nutrients and moisture; but also of course for the aesthetic value derived from their habit of falling and cascading over rocks. Nor must one leave out their potability.