Kevin Explores

05/09/2026

This morning's flight took me over Hann Tableland, about 20km northwest of Mareeba, then on to Lake Mitchell.

The range sits on the Mareeba Granite, an Early Permian rock more than 250 million years old — and the same granite the town of Mareeba is built beside and named for. It's commonly described as a two-mica granite, containing biotite and muscovite, and that mineralogy shapes how it weathers: the dark streaks on exposed rock faces are associated with the breakdown of iron-bearing biotite, while the sandy ground nearby often still glints with muscovite long after the granite itself has broken down.

Lake Mitchell is an embankment dam across the Mitchell River, about 20km north of Mareeba. The bare, cracked plain around it fits the same longer story — alluvial sediment carried down by the Mitchell River and its tributaries off the surrounding uplands, with younger deposits still forming along active channels today.

Before the railway reached Granite Creek — renamed Mareeba as the line arrived in 1893 — this country was crossed by the major overland route connecting the coast to the inland goldfields and tinfields. The Bump Track, opened in 1877, climbed the range near Port Douglas, then ran inland through Wetherby Station and Mount Molloy, crossing the Little Mitchell River on its way to Mareeba, Herberton and the Hodgkinson goldfield.

One rock, connecting a mountain range, a river plain, a coach road, and a town.

For more from earlier flights, see first link in first comment

Cheers, Kevin

22/08/2026

🚂 Congratulations to the Atherton-Herberton Historic Railway crew — the 1905 Peckett locomotive steamed into Moomin Station for the first time. 👏

First public run to Moomin on the extended line.

20/08/2026

🚂 Huge congratulations to the volunteers at Atherton-Herberton Historic Railway! 🚂

This weekend marks a milestone for Herberton — after years of dedicated volunteer work (90,000+ hours restoring their 1905 Peckett steam locomotive and its 1913 wooden carriage), the historic line has been extended, with the newly completed Moomin Station now open to steam for the first time. What an achievement for a small volunteer-run operation.

Fittingly, this weekend's runs out to Moomin Station have sold out — a great sign for a project built entirely on community effort. If you're ever exploring the Atherton Tablelands, make time to stop into Herberton Railway Station and ride the line. Small heritage projects like this run on visitor support.

🚉 Herberton Railway Station, John Street
🎟️ Long run to Moomin Station & standard run — check athrail.com/bookings for upcoming dates

19/08/2026

Lighthouse Mountain

About 10 km from Mt Molloy along the Peninsula Development Road, heading to Mt Carbine, you may notice a sign "Lighthouse Mountain" and notice on a distant hilltop, a solitary white rock column. Yesterday, I stopped to take a closer look with the drone. On returning home, I researched the location.

It's granite. Specifically the Northedge Granite, a Permian-age intrusion (roughly 260–299 million years old) that crystallised deep underground and has spent the eons since being slowly uncovered by erosion. Most of the surrounding country here is ancient sea floor — the Hodgkinson Formation, layers of Devonian-age marine mud and sand now folded into hills — and magma like the batch that formed this rock was intruded up into it as scattered bodies, cooling and crystallising into granite underground, which is exactly why this pale column stands out from everything around it. The rock is a tourmaline-muscovite-biotite monzogranite — basically granite with a lot of white mica and quartz and not much dark mineral content, which is exactly why it reads so pale against the darker ridgelines behind it.

The pinnacle itself is what geologists call a tor: granite naturally cracks into blocks as it cools, and while still buried under a cover of weathered debris, groundwater works down those cracks and rots the rock — mostly underground, out of sight, over millions of years. That process leaves rounded, resistant corestones sitting in a softer, sandy matrix, still buried. Only much later does erosion strip away that softer cover, exposing the toughest, least-fractured corestones at the surface. That's your lighthouse.

Bonus mystery: the geology map also shows a swarm of d***s or veins running through this same granite body — later injections of magma or mineral-rich fluid squeezed into cracks after the main granite had already solidified, after it cooled. What exactly they are, I haven't been able to pin down.

Two hundred and sixty million years in the making, and it's still standing.

📍 Between Mount Molloy and Mount Carbine, Mareeba Shire, Far North Queensland

05/08/2026

I've started something new alongside the Field Notes here on Facebook — a regular wrap-up on Substack pulling together what's happening across Kevin Explores in one place.

This week's edition covers the rebuilt Torres Strait and Millaa Millaa Falls pages, the mapping and geology tools I use, five books to recommend and a podcast worth your time, and where the guest contributions are heading.

It's shorter than the website, more frequent than Facebook, and free straight to your inbox.

Substack link in the comments.

New Field Notes delivered directly to you — subscribe to follow the journey.

04/08/2026

Break from volcanoes and web edits well spent. A couple of hours at Hastie's Swamp Sunday morning turned up a terrific mix — Victoria's Riflebirds working the bark for insects, a family of Magpie Geese loafing on a log with a cormorant drying off beside them, an Australasian Grebe cruising the lily pads, Eastern Yellow Robins and Pale-yellow Robins lighting up the understorey, and a couple of Macleay's and Yellow-spotted Honeyeaters keeping busy in the canopy. Brown Cuckoo-Doves rounded it out. Sometimes the best editing happens after you've stood at the edge of the swamp for an hour.

02/08/2026

From the air, you can trace a line from Millaa Millaa Falls back to a low green hill on the skyline — and that hill is a volcano.

I've gone back and deepened the Millaa Millaa Falls webpage, and looking closer turned up more than I expected. The dark wall behind the water is two stacked lava flows. The creek that flows over the falls starts on the flank of an old shield volcano, sitting right there in the paddocks west of town. And the rolling green country all around is that same basalt — long since rotted to the red soil that supports the dairy farms. The falls are one of the few windows where the rock is still bare.

What I like most about this one is what I still can't answer. Did that volcano's lava make the flows in the face of the falls? Why does the waterfall sit at exactly this spot? How does such a small catchment keep it running through the dry? I've put my best reading on the page — and been honest about where the rock hasn't revealed to me yet.

That's the thing about looking closely at a place: the better you understand it, the more questions it hands you.

Millaa Millaa Falls sits on Mamu Country.

Full story — link in comments.
Country from above.

28/07/2026

Eight thousand years ago, none of this was sea.

The Torres Strait — Zenadh Kes — is one of the youngest bodies of water on Earth. The continental shelf between Cape York and New Guinea was dry land until rising seas at the end of the last ice age drowned it. What you see from the air today is that drowned landscape made visible: cobalt blue over the deep former valleys, turquoise over the shallows where the old surface sits just beneath the water.

The islands are simply the parts that didn't go under.

What makes this place extraordinary — from altitude, at least — is that within 150 kilometres of water, five completely different kinds of island exist. Ancient granite peaks, the same rock that underlies Cape York Peninsula, rising steeply from the shallows. A volcanic island rising 230 metres from the reef, formed from a basaltic eruption centre millions of years ago — the very rock that Eddie Mabo fought for in the High Court of Australia. Coral cays built from reef-derived sand, only a few thousand years old, their Pisonia forest canopy visible as a dark green dome from altitude. Flat sediment islands barely above sea level, built from New Guinea river mud, sitting four kilometres from the Papua New Guinea coast.

And over all of it, the tidal engine — the Coral Sea and the Arafura Sea forcing their competing tides through a 12-metre-deep channel, driving currents strong enough to scour bedrock, shaping every reef, every sand spit, every island margin in the strait.

This is a place with more geological variety per square kilometre than almost anywhere in Australia. It is also the home of the Zenadh Kes people — sea navigators whose knowledge of these tides, currents, and reefs represents thousands of years of accumulated understanding.

The full story — geology, ecology, history, and what to look for from the air — via a link in the comments.

New field notes delivered to your inbox — subscribe on Substack, link in bio.

Country from above.
Cheers, Kevin

25/07/2026

There's a story written into every landscape — in rock, river, and ancient seabed — that most of us walk straight past. Not because we don't care, but because nobody's shown us how to read it.

I've just published the first proper Field Note for Kevin Explores: who I am, why I fly, and what this whole project is actually building toward. If you've ever looked at Far North Queensland from above and wondered what you were really looking at, this one's for you.

Learning and Sharing

22/07/2026

The response to Windin Falls surprised me a bit — how many of you sat with those fracture lines, asked questions about the escarpment, wanted to know more about rock that's been there since before there was anything alive to see it.

That's the whole reason this page exists. Not to show you pretty drone shots of waterfalls (though I hope they're that too), but because there's a story written into this country — in ancient seabeds and rifts and a hundred million years of slow retreat — that most of us walk past without anyone ever pointing it out. I'm not an expert telling you what I already know. I'm someone who lives here, genuinely working it out, and sharing that as it happens.

If that's been landing for you, there's more of it waiting. I write a longer Field Note on Substack each time — the full unfolding of a place, not just the caption version — and I share word on useful resources and updates from the website collections too. First proper one is going out shortly, and it's the best starting point if you want to go deeper than the feed allows. It's free, delivered straight to your email, and you'll never miss one.

Link's in the comments — come along.

Cheers, K.