Just Keep on travelling: Piccaninny Creek and Domes Walk

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Piccaninny Creek and Domes Walk

Piccaninny Creek signage, Bungle Bungles

After we had been in the amphitheatre for a while we made our way back down the gorge and took the short detour to Piccaninny Creek. As it is the dry season the creek is currently dry but during the wet season this is apparently a raging torrent. The creek is the beginning of a Piccaninny Gorge walk which is a two to seven day hike (seems a huge variation to me) into a remote and apparently magnificent gorge. We were not about to make the mistake and commence that walk.

Close up of Domes, The Bungle Bungles NP

Peter thought the termite mound far up on the ridge of one of the domes looked like the statue of Mary high on the hill near Paraparaumu in New Zealand, however this one lacking a coat of paint. If not Mary perhaps it was some other fella telling us where to go!

We returned back along the creek and took the domes walk loop which was an easy one kilometre loop track winding around the domes. The literature provided on the park says that the domes are unrivalled in their scale, grandeur and diversity of form anywhere in the world. They were certainly very different to anything we have seen in the other gorges we have visited.

Aboriginal people have apparently lived in this part of Australia for more than 20,000 years. Gold was found in nearby Halls Creek in 1885 and this sparked the first gold rush in Western Australia.

The drive into the National Park is through the Mabel Downs Station – pastoralists arrived in the area in the late nineteenth century and the huge Bramah cattle are still farmed today and these were roaming freely alongside the road into the park. They must be used to seeing the vehicles as they didn’t take much notice of us even though there were no fences.