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.