Ball's Pyramid

It is not a comfortable ocean, and rising from this uncomfortable ocean ahead of you is the tallest volcanic sea stack in the world.

Ball's Pyramid is not an island in any conventional sense.

It is a rock, a single vertical knife-edge spire of dark volcanic basalt that rises five hundred and sixty-two meters from the ocean surface to a peak so narrow that a person standing on it could extend their arms and have them hang over empty space on both sides.

The stack is barely wide enough at its base to provide a surface that could generously be described as a foothold, and it tapers as it rises, narrowing and narrowing and narrowing until it disappears into cloud on overcast days, which is most days because the Tasman Sea generates cloud with the same reliability that it generates swells.

The shape of Ball's Pyramid is difficult to convey in words because it does not resemble any landform that most people have experience with.

It is not a mesa.

It is not a butte.

Relentless, ultimately victorious assault on anything that dares to rise above its surface.

It is not a comfortable ocean, and rising from this uncomfortable ocean ahead of you is the tallest volcanic sea stack in the world.

Ball's Pyramid is not an island in any conventional sense.

It is a rock, a single vertical knife-edge spire of dark volcanic basalt that rises 562 metres from the ocean surface to a peak so narrow that a person standing on it could extend their arms and have them hang over empty space on both sides.

The stack is barely wide enough at its base to provide a surface that could generously be described as a foothold.

and it tapers as it rises, narrowing and narrowing and narrowing until it disappears into cloud on overcast days, which is most days because the Tasman Sea generates cloud with the same reliability that it generates swells.

The shape of Ball's Pyramid is difficult to convey in words because it does not resemble any landform that most people have experience with.

It is not a mesa.

It is not a butte.