“I don’t know anyplace in the world where you can see as much glacial geology as right here,” says retired geology professor Charlie Hickox.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

WESTERLY — Though he’s approaching 90, Charles F. Hickox Jr., of West Kingston, sprints up the incline towards the marker recently placed in his honor at the Dr. John Champlin Glacier Park, on Shore Road.

Hickox declares it one of the most magnificent spots in the world, this Atlantic seaboard brink, but not necessarily because of this gasp-worthy view at what is now to be called Charlie’s Overlook. It’s not just the bird life, or the plants, or the vista that inspires him.

Hickox likes the very earth he stands upon.

“I don’t know anyplace in the world where you can see as much glacial geology as right here,” he says. “These big old boulders were carried down by the glacier.”

And he goes back thousands of years to relate the area’s earliest era. He talks of ice sheets, of tundra, of a sea level very different from the one in front of him. He talks of woolly mammoths and herds of caribou.

In Westerly.

It all happened long, long ago, he said, thousands of years. But to him, glacial advances, and what was left behind, are as clear in his mind as the dedication ceremony held at this spot just a few days earlier, when the Westerly Land Trust named the site at Glacier Park in his honor. A bench and a plaque there make it official.

“I have no trouble imagining what happened here,” he says.

CHARLES F. HICKOX JR. is a retired geology professor and a Westerly native. He earned his bachelor’s degree in geology at Harvard University and a Ph.D. in the same subject from Yale, and taught at Maine’s Colby College, at Colorado College and Connecticut College.

He spent his growing-up years in Westerly’s Beach, Margin and Main Street areas, swimming in the Pawcatuck River, which he says at the time was “filthy.”

Yet he fished for blue crabs, he says, floated on ice, built rafts. Ironically, he didn’t play in any Westerly woods where he might have come face to face with those house-size boulders he so admires.

He never figured out why he feels so connected to terrain, especially, uneven terrain.

“Nebraska is the most boring state,” he says, referring to its flat plain.

But he followed his innate connection to the earth’s origins, leading a glaciological expedition to the Swiss Alps, taking four wilderness canoe trips to the Yukon, and Baffin Island.

AFTER A LIFETIME of studying the earth, he returned to his roots in 1975. (His Westerly ancestors in the Maxson line are young in comparison with the boulders he studies; they date only to the 17th century.) When Hickox returned to the area, he joined the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association and the Westerly Land Trust.

The 134 acres where his overlook sits are named for Dr. John Champlin, who left the property in trust for his second wife. When she died, the land was passed to the Lathrop family. The Westerly Land Trust purchased the property from them in 2004.

Champlin was a prominent Westerly figure who advocated for a community hospital and even set up a small unit in his own home, which still stands at Granite Street and Grove Avenue, not far from where Hickox grew up.

Hickox — the geologist, educator and hiker — is also an author. He co-wrote, with Elly Heyder, Walks in the Watershed, a hiker’s guide to southwestern Rhode Island and adjacent Connecticut, a pocket-size book put out by the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association.

While the booklet focuses on directions, distance, time and difficulty, it also offers observations such as, “the trail is steep, rocky, and narrow. It crosses several small rills under a canopy of hardwood. It traverses a granitic ridge to a vista.”

Hickox likes granitic ridges, rills, and kettle holes — depressions caused by melting ice — and at his overlook he gazes with fascination upon a kettle hole he has seen hundreds of times.

“When the Westerly Land Trust was offered the Lathrop property, I recognized its geological significance,” recalled Harvey C. Perry, Westerly Land Trust president.

“I called him [Hickox] and we walked the property together, with him explaining to me what it was that I was seeing, and how the topography was formed by a glacier. He was very animated, enthusiastic, and inspirational. He told me that to have a recessional moraine system in an undeveloped state, overlooking a glacier outwash plain in an undeveloped state, and to be able to see the terminal moraine of Block Island and Long Island, all in one place, is globally unique.”

Hickox repeats that observation.

“What a spot. It’s magnificent.”

IN THE LAND TRUST newsletter, Hickox described the spot as “the only place in the world you can see such end-moraine characteristics.”

Perhaps this spot bearing Charlie’s name is to geologists what Federal Hill is to foodies: So much of a good thing it’s almost overwhelming. Though one access to the overlook is by way of a neighborhood in progress, visitors can clearly see the forest and the trees, still, and beautiful sunbeams peek through, while Block Island and Long Island rest in the distance, and Winnapaug Pond sparkles in the foreground.

The park is between Shore and Tom Harvey roads. An extensive trail system is accessible from Tom Harvey Road.

Hickox didn’t just recognize the significance of the area when Perry took him there walking, he also went on to clear many of those trails, some just a few years ago. “I’ve been clearing trails here for years, and years, and years.”

So it is appropriate in more ways than one that a plaque bearing his name has been placed in the Land Trust’s glacier park, noting that he “helped to create the Dr. John Champlin Glacier Park and to develop its trail system and signs describing the Park’s unique geological features and natural history.’

WHILE HICKOX loves this spot, he’s not sure he’ll be back much this summer. There are things to do closer to his West Kingston home, where he lives with his wife of 60 years, Jean. They have five children and eight grandchildren, and there’s canoeing and kayaking to fill whatever days he chooses to paddle.

“I just throw it in the truck,” he said of his 35-pound kayak.

According to Denise Poyer, program director for the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association, Hickox has been known to kayak the river every month of the year. When she needs someone to turn to for programming, she turns to Hickox.

“Charlie was instrumental in teaching me about the area,” she says. “He took me on many hikes and talked to me about the geology and history and he always has these penny adventures, these side trips to see something unusual, like an old foundation.

“He’s easily bored,” she added, so when he organizes hikes, he designs them in a loop so that the hiker doesn’t pass the same place twice.

Hickox leads kayaking trips for the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association and the Westerly Land Trust. Dates have been set by the Trust for July 24, at 9:30 a.m., to Barn Island, and Aug. 21 from Bradford to Potter Hill. Hickox will lead both. For directions and information, call the Westerly Land trust at (401) 315-2610. Executive director Kelly Presley said an Aug. 2 trip is also planned from Bradford to Potter Hill, and though Hickox isn’t leading it, “he usually joins us for the trip.”

PRESELY, POYER and Harvey Perry marvel at Hickox’s energy.

“I remember one occasion when we were cutting a trail together when he was 80 years old,” Perry says. “I brought my brush cutter, a weed whacker with a blade. He took it away and wouldn’t give it back for hours.

Hickox smiles a wily smile.

“My parents lived into their 90s,” he says.

“It’s in the genes.”

afleming@projo.com