Joggins Fossil Cliffs: Guest Blog
I am honored to have a guest blog by Melanie Cookson-Carter, Operations Coordinator for the Joggins Fossil Cliffs and Centre.
When I get asked how long someone should schedule for a trip to Joggins I am always at a loss for an answer.
As Operations Coordinator for the Joggins Fossil Cliffs and Centre I have the enviable job of meeting with our visitors to find out what they enjoyed about their visit, what was perhaps missing and how we could work a little harder to enhance their experience. One of the most popular answers that people give during my conversations with them is that they wish that they had more time to enable them to stay longer.
I have visited hundreds of sites throughout the world and those which stick in my memory are those which I have walked away from after a tangible experience, one which leaves me wanting more. We don’t even need to try here; The Fossil Cliffs of Joggins manage to do this all by themselves.
Watching people walking along the beach, rarely do you ever see anyone walking with their head up. Everyone walks, watching the ground at their feet, hoping to find fossils. Most of them do, and with every high tide (we are on the Bay of Fundy, which boasts of having the world’s highest tides) there is the opportunity of nature playing along and helping new fossils to become uncovered.
What makes a visit here even more special is that it is an all-round sensory experience, one which can fulfill each of the ingredients on an experiential recipe. You can feel the rocky beach and the wind in your hair, taste the salt in the air and smell the ozone and even most importantly touch fossils which are 300million years old. The site has been referred to as a ‘Coal-Age Galapagos’.
As Kim has rightly mentioned, the Joggins Fossil Cliffs were inscribed onto the World Heritage List by UNESCO in July 2008. This is no small thing. It took over ten years of hard work by a small team of passionate and dedicated people and has catapulted the Cliffs into the realm of other cultural and natural heritage giants such as Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Galapagos Islands and the Great Pyramids of Giza (to name only a small number of the 878 World Heritage Sites).
Inscription means that the site is of significant universal value and Joggins statement is that:
“The classic coastal section at Joggins, Nova Scotia, is of outstanding universal value. It contains an unrivalled fossil record preserved in its environmental context, which represents the finest example in the world of the terrestrial tropical environment and ecosystems of the Pennsylvanian ‘Coal Age’ of the Earth’s history.”We have welcomed over 17,000 people through the doors of our new state of the art visitor and research centre here on the site and a few thousand more that have skipped the centre and gone straight for the beach. I could count the number of negative comments we have received from our visitors on one hand, such is the amazing standard of general experience of the site, and when 75% of those have been about the weather we know that we are doing something right.
We have a fantastic cafe, the Roundhouse (named after the building, which used to be close by and which was used to turn the steam trains around) which serves the best organic, fair-trade coffee and tea for miles, as well as homemade cakes, salads and sandwiches (no fryers here) and we have an awe-inspiring collection of fossils, harvested from the site over the past sixty years and more. You can learn about fossilization, evolution, the debate between science and the church and clutch your new-found knowledge to your chest as you descend our staircase onto the beach and become dwarfed by the massive cliffs.
Can you take fossils? No. The site is protected (and has been since 1972 by the way) which means that all natural materials on the beach must remain where you find them. You can touch and you can pick up the fossils but you have to put them back. Some say this is wrong and that the tide will only destroy the fossils but we have to be able to research the site and to enable us to do this it has to be left for Mother Nature. After all she created it and it shall be her who decides its fate.
Many of our team of Interpreters have been recruited from the community and have a hereditary knowledge of the cliffs, which has been passed down through the branches of their family tree to them and it is this that makes a guided tour of the cliffs so special, it is the anecdotal and personal tales of how the cliffs have touched the lives of locals and become the inspiration for many family stories scores of years before becoming a global phenomenon.
We are open for the 2009 season between 22nd April and 31st October but we are happy to welcome visitors outside of these times if they call ahead and if you want to know how long to schedule for your visit, I would say all the time in the world!
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