Only Yesterday I Mentioned Rockhounds,

and here today is a place they might like to visit,

 Taiwan’s Yehliu Geopark, the park is situated about an hour outside of Taipei on a tiny peninsula in Taiwan’s northern coast, the coastal region of the Yehliu peninsula is mainly made up of sedimentary rocks which over millennia due to exposure to wind, sun and the action of the sea have shaped the local rock into mushroom-like pedestal rocks, or “hoodoo rocks,” that dot the landscape,

Hoodoo rocks are found all over the world, particularly in high, dry, rocky regions like the North American Badlands and the Colorado Plateau, these formations can stretch anywhere from four-to-five to hundreds of feet tall, they are often composed of soft sedimentary stone capped off with harder, less-eroded rock, but the rocks at Yehliu are a different from most, not only are they some of the only hoodoos known to form in a seaside environment, but according to a 2001 study of the Yehliu formations published in the journal Western Pacific Earth Sciences, the hoodoos are composed of the same type of rock through and through, “We found that the head, the neck and the surrounding ground are all composed of the same type of rock,” the researchers concluded. “The only difference is the outer appearance that is more reddish [in] colour [on] the outer, altered rock, due to staining of iron oxides such as hematite and/or limonite on the rock.”

 the alien-looking Yehliu landscape was first catapulted to fame after Taiwanese photographer Huang Tse-Hsiu published his series “Yehliu – Forsaken Paradise” in 1962, following his photographs, the peninsula quickly became a favourite travel destination for tourists, today, people from all over the world travel to see these unique formations, but with fame there also is a downside, while more tourists visiting Yehliu means more money that will go toward protecting the landscape, it also hastens its wear and tear, despite warnings by park staff to keep off the rocks, the formations are tempting for people to touch and climb on—all of which speeds up their weathering, one popular formation known as “the Queen’s Head” has lost about five inches in the last eight years alone, leaving park authorities worried that a "beheading" could occur soon, as the BBC reported last year, so look do not touch, unlike these mindless vandals when they visited Cape Kiwanda’s rock pedestal in America, known as the Duckbill, which has been a famous Oregon landmark for decades and deliberately toppled it over.