2006/07 Australia trip - Echidna Chasm, Purnululu |
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Wednesday July 5th
Our next destination was Purnululu, the home of the now famous Bungle Bungles, striped rocks shaped like giant beehives. We were off early to allow plenty of time for driving the notorious 4wd track into Purnululu, but first we had about three hours of driving south on the Great Northern Highway. It’s a quiet road, with little traffic other than tourists and road trains. It goes through some beautiful country, winding between two mountain ranges, both of them raw rock with little vegetation, naked geology on show. The road is quite good, narrow in places to where two vehicles barely fit, and with the occasional one-lane bridge with ankle-high safety barriers, to make sure you are paying attention.
We turned east onto the road across the Mabel Downs station into Purnululu, and had about 40 miles of 4wd track to cover. As 4wd tracks go, it isn’t bad but after two hours of coping with water crossings, sand traps, rocks, and holes, not to mention dodging each other, drivers tend to get careless. One of the adventure-tour buses ahead of us broke an axle and had the whole dual wheel assembly come free of the bus, so he was well and truly stuck, blocking the road. The rest of us had to take to the bush to get around him, bouncing over rocks and shrubs. The picture to the left shows a typical water crossing, about thigh deep.
We saw what appeared to be a very large cat on the way in, black and at least twice the size of a house cat. Apparently some of Australia’s feral (gone wild) cats are reverting to the size of the wild cats they originally came from.
At the park’s visitor centre we bought a month’s worth of park entrance passes for Western Australia, and paid for three night’s camping. It seemed that we’d be paying about three times as much as we did in the Northern Territory for the same camping facilities, plus some entrance fees. Although most of the Australian parks we visited are “national” parks, each state has its own rules and prices for the parks within its borders.
We drove to Kurrajong campground, via yet another water crossing, found ourselves a good site, and after a very late lunch set
off for the Echidna Chasm. The drive into the park had been very scenic, when we had time to look at it and weren’t negotiating road hazards, but it just got better when we entered the park. The cliffs of the Bungle Bungle range were a wall along the eastern horizon, brick red and reflecting the late afternoon sun.
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Bungle Bungles (4.48) |
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The hike into Echidna Chasm follows a rocky stream bed, so it’s hard on the ankles. A sign at the beginning says “Watch out for falling rocks” and “Keep away from crumbling cliffs”. The whole mountain range is conglomerate, hard pebbles in sandstone cement, so it’s always crumbling and dropping rocks, and the cliffs are only three feet apart in places, so it’s hard to see how you could do that! Echidna Creek begins with a waterfall, what Texans would call a “pour off”, far back in the mountain range and then cuts this very narrow chasm through the mountains, hip-wide in places. The cliffs are hundreds of feet high, and bowed so that they hide the sky, and it was almost dark in places inside the chasm.
By the time we had climbed our way out, the sun was setting and lighting up the front wall of the Bungle Bungle Range. Everything appeared tinted pink with the reflected light off those glowing rocks. We barely made it back into the campground in time, not being too keen to drive a 4wd track in the dark. After such a hot day we were surprised at how quickly the air cooled down.