Just the Flinders Ranges

Date of Adventure about 27 December 2024 to about 6 January 2025

I’m getting way behind in posting things that I’ve been doing so I thought I’d just make a huge post of travels through the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

I’ll start with just driving into the Flinders and a little bit of what it’s like driving down some of the roads that I was on. I did spend quite some driving time on tarmac (paved roads) but that isn’t the interesting part. This video shows driving in as well as some of the driving in the gorges in the northern part of the Flinders.

Originally, I expected these to be higher mountains. And it’s really desert mountains except for the areas around the creeks. It’s been a relatively dry year so all of the creeks I saw were dry beds. But they all had trees growing along them, mostly eucalyptus of one kind or another. There are lots of different kinds of eucalyptus in Australia. Someone told me over 100 varieties and I could believe that.

To add to the video, here are a few more pictures of the Flinders.

One of my reasons for coming to the area was to explore abandoned mining towns. Well, it turns out that there were abandoned buildings and mines all over. Just driving the paved roads I saw dozens of abandoned stone buildings. (Check out the prior post on the Abandoned Town of Wilson.) A lot of the abandoned buildings were clearly homesteads in relatively open areas. Back in the mid 1800’s there was a significant effort to grow wheat in this region. A lot of the farmers were put out of business by drought. This year, as I was driving through, I could see a few areas that are probably planted but have been cut and harvested and not yet replanted. But mostly the region is stations (ranches). More sheep than anything but some cattle as well. And it takes a huge amount of land to graze one cow. So the stations around here are the biggest in the world. (Eat your heart out King Ranch!!).

Up one of the gorges that I drove there was an abandoned homestead, the Hill homestead, with an abandoned windmill. I don’t know when this place was abandoned but it was obviously not that long ago.

There has been a bit of wildlife. Generally I see lots of birds and quite a few different varieties. Parrots and crows are the most common but lots of others. In this area, I’ve seen quite a few of the BIG birds.

There were feral camels a month ago. In the Flinders there are lots of feral goats. I’ve seen them at most campsites, except the caravan park in Wilpena. They are a little skittish but I managed a few photos, including some of goats in the “trap” that a guy had up the way from one of my gorge campsites.

The towns are all pretty small and somewhat closed down because it’s hot and off season. No reason to keep a restaurant open if there aren’t any customers. Parachilna is a tiny village, actually on one of the main paved roads. This is the one where I was hoping to get a dinner of local, feral meat.

Here are a few more sights. The last two are in the town of Quorn, which is where the Ghan Railway ran and they’ve kept a lot of the relics and remnants of that old railroad.

The rock outcroppings throughout the area are kind of different because they are all at angles or even perpendicular to the horizon. I guess I’m more used to the layers being closer to parallel to the horizon. However, it does make for interesting scenery!!

Although hot, the camping has been pretty easy and pleasant.

And sunrises and sunsets have been spectacular. I’m not sure why. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of dust in the air. I always think that dust and pollution make for the best sunsets.

Of course there’s virtually no light pollution so nights are great! I’m not that good at nighttime photography but have tried from time to time. One of these nights, in the middle of nowhere, on a new moon, I’m going to try to get pictures of the milky way. One night, in the gorges I was trying for some star photos and got this one, taken to the south. Not a great example but I’m sure that the colors in the sky are due to the aurora australis.

Blinman

Date of Adventure 4-5 January 2025

This is just a quick report on an interesting couple of days in the northern part of the Flinders.

Blinman is a small town with only a few permanent residents at the northern end of the Flinders Ranges. I was hoping to visit a couple of abandoned mines in the area but one of them, the Nuccaleena ruins were closed. They are on private property and normally open. But a week or so before I got there someone exploring the ruins, climbed over one of the protection fences and fell into a mine shaft. They had to send a rescue team to get him out and so they’ve closed the mine ruins until they can change things. But the town itself was the site of a very productive copper mine. The mine is now abandoned. For a price, $30, you can get a tour. I was kind of surprised, there were about a dozen of us on the tour the afternoon I took it. It’s been hot and way off season for the area so I didn’t think there would be many people on the tour.

Mike, the guy who led the tour was fantastic. He’s also the owner of the “eco park” where I camped. This mine was operated before mechanization and he tried to give us all the general sense of what it would have been like mining with hand tools and using only candle light. I still can’t imagine it. Most of the miners were from Cornwall and were pretty small people. And their general living conditions, in this desert, would have been unbelievably hard.

These pictures were all taken inside the mine. A few of them were taken where the mine shafts from above intersected the side tunnels. This tour was very much worth it!!

The town itself was mostly closed down. A little unfortunate because there is a store with local stuff that I would have liked to visit.

Like many of these abandoned or almost abandoned towns in the Flinders, Blinman has an interesting cemetery. I couldn’t tell much about any sort of event that killed people but there are headstones that go way back in the 1800’s. And a few that have been replaced with more modern gravestones.

Wilpena Pound

Date of Adventure 1 January to about 11 January 2025

More out of sequence posts coming. I’m way behind on posting adventures so I’m going to just quickly write a few things and post a little about some of the places I’ve been. These are mostly in the Flinders Ranges. This one is about Wilpena Pound, which is the most famous single place in the Flinders. It’s a very unusual, to me, sort of bowl in the mountains. I camped in the caravan park twice. The second time was at the end of my Flinders adventures and I stopped there because the campground has good hot showers and a washing machine. It was time to get it back together after over a week in the serious outback.

Here’s a photo that I stole off the internet to show what it looks like from a long distance.

The campground was nice, but only because it was way off season so there weren’t many people there. I don’t have any pictures of the campground but there were trees and shade and I was able to camp in relative solitude.

I hiked to the overlook of the pound and it’s a really impressive view but almost impossible to reproduce in photos. However here are a few to show you what it looks like.

The area has an interesting history. Of course the Indigenous people knew of it because it has significantly more water than the surrounding ranges. There was an extended effort by white people to grow wheat in the pound (valley). They were only moderately successful because of the difficulty of getting in and out of the pound. They had to go through a very small and congested “pass”. They improved the passage and all was well until one year when there were terrific rains, which washed away all of their roadwork. After that, they basically gave up and moved on to farming the nearby areas outside of the pound.

And as a monument to the history, here’s a carved rock along the trail to the lookout.

Why is it a “pound”? I had to look it up. They referred to it as a pound because it’s a closed bowl that resembles an enclosure for animals. I guess in older English they called animal enclosures pounds.

Gorges 1

Date of Adventure 2-3 January 2025

There will be at least a couple of posts about the gorges in the Flinders Ranges. It’s been an interesting time touring through the area waaay off season. As a result there are few people around. I spent a couple of nights in the caravan part at Wilpena Pound and it was pretty nice. I had lots of room in the “unpowered” area, hot showers, and an interesting hike to the lookout to see what the “Pound” is all about. More of that will be in later posts, as will pictures and stories of some of the mines in the area. In a way I’m kind of killing time here in the Flinders because it’s School Holidays. During school holidays a lot of the campgrounds, beaches, etc. get really crowded. I’m avoiding the crowds even though it’s been pretty hot. Most days getting into mid 30’s and today while driving the car thermometer said 42 at one point. The downside is that a lot of things are completely closed. Most of them are only of minor interest to me but I’m sorry about missing a few of them. One is the Prairie Hotel. It’s a recently refurbished hotel, restaurant, and pub in the town of Parachilna. The reason I’m sorry about it being closed is that they apparently have really good dinners using feral meats, like emu, kangaroo, and goat. Or classic beef and lamb. You have to search around through their website to see the full menu.  Click Here  A large percentage of the camping in the Flinders is Station Camping. Some stations (ranches) have set up areas where people can camp and they often have toilets, showers, and even camp kitchens. I’ve been pretty lucky so far. I had three of the stations that are officially closed allow me to camp at their campsites. The first one had reasonable bathrooms and even enough water in their tank for a shower. I’m now camped at an abandoned mine on a station with only toilets (that’s OK with me) and he’s allowing me to camp for free. Soon I’ll have pictures and descriptions of that stay. It’s been good.

I left the campground at Wilpena Pound a little before 8 AM to try to get some pictures with early light. It just gets bright by midday. I drove the road through the Bunyaroo Gorge the first day and camped at a National Park campsite. The next day I drove through Brachina Gorge, up the highway and through Parachilna Gorge to the town of Blinman, population about 30. More about that in a future post. These pictures are in Bunyaroo Gorge. Here’s the map of the route.

I keep trying to get a good video of the kangaroos running around. Most of the time I’m too far away or too slow on the draw to get anything. It’s pretty hard to capture what you are seeing with a camera. But here’s one of a kangaroo that was hanging out on the side of the track and got scared off as I drove by.

I’m trying to experiment with a few things and learn how to shoot, edit, and use video . This is a pretty long one made of several clips as I was driving through the Bunyaroo Gorge. To appreciate it you really have to look into the distance and not down at the road. The road itself doesn’t change a whole lot but the scenery does. I realize that it’s kind of long but you can stick with it and see what the drive looked like to me.

And these are just some random pictures that I took that day.

At one point I stopped in an area that’s supposed to have a small colony of yellow footed rock wallabies. Wallabies are a kind of smaller variety of kangaroo and the rock wallabies are even a little smaller. When I stopped at the turnout there was one that ran up the hillside. But I decided to do a little short hike down into the bottom of the gorge where there were a bunch of trees. I was just sitting in the shade when this pair came along and were sitting about 5 meters away.

They just seemed curious and watched me for a long time before slowly hopping off.

I’ve also been kind of playing around with taking night time photos and sundown time lapse. So here’s one taken the other night. See the shooting star? One evening I was getting a kind of purple glow from the south. It wasn’t very strong but now I’m wondering if it wasn’t the Southern Aurora. One of these nights, in a few weeks when the moon is gone I think I’ll try for a shot of the Milky Way. The time lapse is a little harder, something has to change at the right speed and so far I haven’t gotten it.

I’ll be putting together a couple more posts about some of the interesting things in the Flinders…abandoned mines, homesteads, and just general scenery.