Last year on my trip to Dantzic Cove I felt I hadn't really spent enough time at the site and went away too soon, not investigating properly what Howley described as a "great deal of disturbance". This summer I planned a family vacation to the Burin Peninsula in order to get back there. My husband, son, his friend and I spent four days in Garnish which included kayaking, golfing, swimming and a hike back to Dantzic Cove.
This time I got up close and personal with the rocks. It's so much better to be able to touch and observe the rocks then look at them from a camera lens, because of an impending thunderstorm that's all I did when I first visited there in 2014. This time I walked all over them, all the way out to the end as far as I could safely go. In Howley's field book of 1870 he states "here all was confusion" and I certainly saw that. There was no clear pattern in the structure, nothing but a jumble of textures, shapes and colours in this little gulch.
As an "arm chair" geologist I don't know how to describe what kind of energy was required to create such a convoluted structure. I recognize folding and a geological map of the area shows that a fault runs through here. But despite all that cataclysmic action in the past, I got a peaceful, quiet feeling from the place, as if the earth's processes had finished all it had to do here and left the rocks in a tight squeeze with each other..like a geological group hug!
