Nele & Andrew Around Oz: Kurrajong Campsite, Purnululu National Park, WA

Day 115 – 11^th June 2011

Kurrajong Campsite, Purnululu National Park, WA

We got up early this morning as we had to drive to the southern end of the park - which is again not far but takes a long time with the many creek crossing and corrugated road. It’s a beautiful drive up to the Piccaninny car park with amazing views – and lots of photo opportunities - of the famous beehive domes. From the car park we took The Domes walk (500m – 15min) to Cathedral Gorge (3km return – 1h), continuing on to the Piccaninny Creek Lookout (1km return – 30min) and Piccaninny Gorge walk along the creek bed (3km return – 1.5h – to the actual start of the Gorge it is a 7h one way hike so we only walked a small portion of it. The full gorge walk is an overnight hike where you spend the night in the gorge or a 7 day hike if you continue on to the other end of the gorge). The domes walk is good to get a close up view and provides good photo opportunities showing the structure of these striped domes. When walking in Cathedral Gorge it actually sounds as if you are in a cathedral and the Piccaninny walk gives you so many wonderful views you have to be careful not to empty your camera battery on one walk. After lunch we drove back to the northern part of the park to do the Echidna Chasm and Osmand Range Lookout walks (2.5km return – 1.5h). Echidna Chasm gets narrower and narrower the further you go, so it also gets darker and darker – best time to do the walk would be at lunch time when the sun is at its highest and you get most sunlight in and you don’t have to worry about the heat as it’s actually cool and shaded in the chasm. After all this walking we felt it was time to relax so we drove to Kungkalanayi Lookout to watch the colour variations while the sun set.