Piha Beach

Following a re-organisation of my web pages, these photographs have moved and can now be found by clicking this link. The Piha beach photographs are now part of my gallery on the pbase.com photographic server.

The following description is kept here for historic reasons

After driving south along Scenic Route 24 for a few kilometres, the road to Piha branches off to the right. Well, strictly speaking, it branches off backwards and to the right, with a 170° turn - thank goodness for power steering!

This road climbs to the higher parts of the Waitakere Ranges to begin with, before descending to the beach at Piha. The first picture on this page shows the first glimpse of Piha as seen from the Piha Road. At first sight, the weather seems to be misty. However, that isn't mist - it's spray thrown up as the waves of the Tasman Sea break, or crash against the rocks at either end of the beach.

The beach is about two kilometres in length, and made up of black volcanic sand with a thin and patchy layer of yellow sand on top. It's a popular spot for surfers, but there were none in evidence that afternoon (Wednesday 23 May 2001). We had the beach almost to ourselves, apart from the occasional dog-walker.

Tree-covered volcanic hills rise straight up at the back of the beach. Where the hills are close enough to the beach to have become cliffs, the action of the waves has formed caves at intervals, and dislodged rocks of various colours which now lie along the base of the cliffs.

At the southern end of the beach crouches the 100 metre high "Lion Rock", which takes its name from its likeness to a sleeping lion (the likeness is more pronounced from the other side). Beyond Lion Rock, the beach continues. Note the stack, which would originally have been part of the cliff behind it, but is now separate owing to the action of the waves on the softer rock that originally linked the stack to the cliff.

More information for the technical minded - the effects of sea spray and falling rain had much the same effect as fog would have done, and by the time we reached the northern end of the beach the light had deteriorated to the extent where fill-in flash was necessary to photograph the rocks at the foot of the cliff.