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.