February 18, 2013

Monday Geology Picture(s): Sandstone and Dassies along the Breede River, South Africa

Posted by Evelyn Mervine

Uplifted sandstone rocks along the Breede River near Robertson, South Africa, February 2013.

This past weekend my husband and I traveled down to Robertson, South Africa to visit family. We’ve been wanting to do a river trip for awhile, so we booked a kayaking trip along the Breede River for Saturday. The Breede is a very beautiful river, and we saw some incredible birds– most of which flew away before we could take a good picture of them! We stopped for a snack and some swimming near the uplifted (nearly vertical!) sandstone rocks in the above picture. We were taking a look at the rocks when we noticed some movement amongst them.The rocks, as it turned out, were full of dassies or rock hyraxes. The dassies kept darting out from the rocks and hopping and waddling (they’re pretty fat!) down to the river for a drink on the hot summer day.

Here are a few pictures of the dassies:

Dassie #1.

Dassie #2.

Dassie #3.