Geology Tours : Expert-led and Small-Group Vacations

Geology highlights: Colourful arches, balanced rocks and petrified dunes at Arches National Park; the Moab Fault; incised river meanders at Goosenecks State Park; iconic spires in Monument Valley; slot canyons; the massive Comb Ridge monocline; the menacing Factory Butte and the occasional dinosaur footprint.

Culture highlights: Landscapes from the perspectives of Native Americans, early explorers, miners, outlaws and Mormons settlers; the cliff dwellings of prehistoric Native American civilization; desert towns.

Geology highlights: Observe the distinctive environments of modern and ancient rift systems; visit the tallest dunes in North America; stroll in the caldera of a giant super-volcano.

Culture highlights: Visit Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in the desert and the cliff dwellings of Bandolier National Park; raft the famed Rio Grande River; experience the impressive art galleries and southwestern cuisine of Santa Fe; ride a horse through the sagebrush; soar in a balloon over the faulted surface of the Rift (optional!).

Geology highlights: The ridges and peaks of Cambrian strata thrust over younger beds that form the Canadian Rockies; a textbook thrust fault at Mount Kidd; a drumlin field; the Mazama ash beds; amazing Trilobite trace fossils and stromatoporoid vugs; vistas of erratic-filled glacial valleys. To the east, the deeply eroded canyons, gullies and hoodoo spires of the colourful Badlands, home to a wealth of dinosaur, reptile, mammal, fish and plant fossils; world-class examples of lateral accretion surfaces and inclined heterolithic strata in outcrop; a day at the Royal Tyrell Museum with its collection of dinosaur and Burgess Shale specimens and a tour of its fossil preparation lab; a guided tour of Dinosaur Provincial Park and a visit to its Hadrosaur House. 

Culture highlights: Two UNESCO World Heritage sites; Calgary Tower; Banff; Icefields Parkway; Morraine Lake and Lake Louise; cooking your own meal in the famous steak pits of Patricia.

Geology highlights: The Boltaña anticline and mountain building processes; superb exposures of deep water sediments; walks along deep gorges cut into platform carbonates; extensive Nummulites limestones.

Culture highlights: The Camino de Santiago; Pyrenean and Spanish cuisine; an off-the-beaten-path wine region; a mountain-top monastery; medieval villages.

Geology highlights: Salt tectonics and a salt mine; the rock spires at Collegats Gorge that inspired Gaudí’s architecture; clues to unravelling the formation of the Pyrenees; dinosaur eggs and footprints; a Neogene volcanic field.

Culture highlights: Less-visited works of two local artists: the architect Antoni Gaudí and the surrealist Salvador Dalí; stroll through perched Medieval towns, cathedrals, monasteries, and castles; sample small-parcel wines at a boutique vineyard. 

Geology highlights: Ride cable cars up to unsurpassed views of the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa and other Alpine peaks while learning about their geology and the incredible tectonic forces that formed them; touch outcrops of oceanic crust; stroll on Alpine glaciers; visit a mining museum.

Culture highlights: 4 and 5 star hotels in charming Alpine towns; scenic trips on mountain railroads; visits to museums, castles and chapels; meals in small restaurants in picturesque French, Italian and Swiss valleys; the history of mountaineering.

Geology highlights: Guided geology walk in central London; the stones of Avebury and Bath; the rounded and graded potato-to pea-size clasts of the 18-mile Chesil Beach. Fossil hunting at Lyme Regis; the iconic Durdle Door arch, Lulworth Cove and Stair Hole; the Etches Collection museum, including the spectacular recently found pliosaur skull.

Culture highlights: Three UNESCO World Heritage sites; an 800-year-old abbey and a Gothic cathedral; famous novelists, Romans, Georgians and Victorians.

Geology highlights: Sites where Darwin was taught to ‘read the rocks and landscapes’ including the volcanic centre of Snowdonia, glacial features at Cwm Idwal and serpentinite on the Isle of Anglesey.

Culture highlights: Ruined forts and carefully preserved castles; Welsh slate mines; Welsh artists; tales of Welsh giants; a stay at a Darwin-themed hotel.

Geology highlights: Loch Ness and the Great Glen Fault; “The Cradle of Geology”: Knockan Crag and the Moine Thrust, one of the locations where thrust faults were first recognised; Loch Eriboll and the outcrop that saw the demise of the Murchison-Geikie “controversy” and the birthplace of a new global tectonics; 3.2-billion-year-old Lewisian gneiss; a 1.3-billion-year-old meteor impact crater.

Culture highlights: History, from Iron Age settlements and the Highland Clearances to the Jacobite Risings and World War II.

Geology highlights: Paleozoic shallow marine, fluvial, lacustrine and massive aeolian clastics as well as volcanics; the conundrum of the Inch Conglomerate; ‘Kerry Diamonds’; the Traberg Conglomerate, an Old Red Sandstone equivalent; extensive glaciated landforms; a slate quarry with vertebrate fossils.

Culture highlights: The last port visited by the Titanic; Irish folk music, cuisine and Irish folklore; hidden beaches with crashing Atlantic waves; abandoned villages; a seal colony. 

Geology highlights: Glacially-smoothed karst limestone hills and dramatic sea cliffs of deepwater shales and cyclic deltaic deposits; the ‘biokarst’ of the Flaggy Shore; networks of subterranean caves, including the Great Stalactite at Doolin Cave; extensive carboniferous limestone pavement at Doolin Pier; the ‘Wormhole’ at Inishmore.

Culture highlights: An Iron Age fort; scenery that’s featured in Hollywood movies; the world-famous Cliffs of Moher, inhabited by seabirds; Irish music; a stay in Ireland’s only Michelin-starred pub.