“Big Head Mountain”

Photo #6 on the previous page shows a goodly portion of the northern flank of what I have dubbed “Big Head Mountain”. On the topographical map, the label big head (the map uses the all-caps form) sits well inland of the coast on the terrain which spans the area between the unnamed brook south of “Between-the-Brooks Mountain” and Lower Delaneys Brook. I will therefore use the name Big Head to refer to the great ridge that will be seen on the next page and the name “Big Head Mountain” to refer to the coastal mountain between these two brooks. Photo #1 shows “Big Head Mountain” from a bit south of Upper Delaneys Brook; Big Head lies inland and outside the scope of this photo. The “knuckles” are in the distance north along the coast; most of “Between-the-Brooks Mountain” is hidden here by “Big Head Mountain”, but a small sliver can be discerned beyond the latter. The remaining photos on this page form a frontal sweep of the coast of “Big Head Mountain” from north to south, as seen from nearly dead-on off-shore.

Photo #2 begins with a wide-angled view of the northern flank, with the unnamed brook valley separating it from “Between-the-Brooks Mountain” at the far left. This flank is pretty heavily forested above the coastal cliffs, though interrupted by a gash. Those cliffs continue the alternating reddish- and grey-hued rocks seen all along this coast.

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Photo #3 has a rather longer focal length than photo #2, though is still fairly wide-angled to include as much of the cliff side as I could (and then I missed a bit, chopping off the top in the upper right). The gash appears to now be the course of an intermittent brook, continuing behind the trees following a line that can be seen reaching up towards the top of the photo, clearly not having recently seen running water in this unusually dry summer of 2012. I speculate that the gash must have been caused by a long ago cataclysmic event, such as a landslide, that gouged out a chunk of the terrain originally there, exposing the cliffs that line the right side of the gash, far too high to be accounted for by the erosion of the brook. In the tree-less area of the gash, the alternating hues can here be seen to be intermixed at various points near the water, leaving a mottled appearance.

The little bump at the upper far left of photo #4 is the knoll that I unintentionally truncated in photo #3; I messed up here, too, truncating the bottom of the cliffs. As it moves to the south, the forest is becoming thinner, leaving more exposed cliff faces, still alternating between red and grey. The upper part of the ridge at the summit is open outcroppings of stone with gravel/dirt/rubble expanses directly below them.

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Photo #5 shows in the foreground and extending to the point at the far right the southern part of the western flank of ‘Big Head Mountain”. Behind that point is the mouth of Lower Delaneys Brook. The mountain on the south side of Lower Delaneys Brook is more prominent in this photo than the coast of “Big Head Mountain”, at least to my eyes, but I will leave further comments on it for a later page. The cave at the left of the photo above the water appears to have nice Roman arches outlining it above and on the sides., though a run-off channel runs across and down those arches (and is likely responsible for carving the cave too) as it spills into the Gulf on the other side of the huge boulder. The alternating red and grey, with some intermixed black, is again particularly noticeable both at the water and in the cliffs above.