Cooktown

Mount Cook National Park, Cooktwoon

“This sentinel looming over the southern outskirts of Cooktown is another hill formed on granite. A walking track to the summit allows vistas out to the sea and across the Endeavour and Annan valleys. Here the rock is a light grey, medium- grained muscovite-biotite granite with numerous large rectangular crystals of feldspar. It has been mapped as part of the Finlayson Granite, which is of late Permian age (about 260 million years old), and it is believed to have solidified at a high level in the crust.

Grassy Hill at the eastern end of the town is of the same granite. but at the top of the hill at the lookout, meta-sediments of the Hodgkinson Formation, heated and hardened by the granite body, are exposed at its edge. They extend to the eastern base of the headland.”

Warwick Willmott, Rocks and Landscapes of National Parks of North Queensland.