Sacred Canyon
This is something I can recommend. The
drive is along 13km of dirt road, with some parts quite corrugated
but nowhere near as bad as you hear for the outback roads, just
enough to be a bit uncomfortable. The drive itself is quite
picturesque (but watch out for roos that hop across the road) and the
walk in the Canyon is very, very pretty. This small chasm contains
ancient Aboriginal rock engravings showing animal tracks, waterholes
and windbreaks. There are some very old engravings up higher on the
walls. These are a bit more difficult to see as they are quite
weathered. There are more recent engravings too. I'm not sure what I
mean by more recent as no time frames are given, but there are some
quite repetitious engravings that are quite deep and detailed and
nowhere near as weathered as the others.
Appealinna Ruins
We drove to the Appealinna Ruins. On
the way in there are a couple of signs low down on the right hand
side of the road. We didn't stop to look at them as they were on the
“wrong” side of the road, and it was freezing cold and the kids
were tired. So we drove to the car park and explored the 3 buildings
of the Ruins. The information there was interesting and the shale
stone house, kitchen and out house were amazing to see and
interesting to imagine living in. On the way out, because the signs
were on the correct side of the road, we stopped to read them. It
turned out there was also a Mens House and Mine Managers Hut ruins,
related to a nearby copper seam, that we could have explored if we
had have walked a fair bit further from the house ruins.
A close up of the construction. At least the rock around here is suitable for building with - it breaks into nice, relatively flat rectangles.
One thing I found is that the
Information Centre really gives you very little information to go on.
I don't know if they have publications you can buy with better
information but the double sided A4 page they gave us really didn't
cover all of the things you can see or do, the walks or the drives,
and we only found things out by accident. Things I mean are our
example at the Appealinna Ruins and we also followed a sign to
“Fossil Worm Tunnels 20m” in the Brachina Gorge …. but had no
idea if what we were looking at were the fossil worm tunnels or not
as there was no signage there and nothing that looked very different
from any of the other weathered and eroded rock in the area. So I
would suggest for anyone heading to the Flinders Ranges to do plenty
of research before hand on the internet or anywhere else you can
think of, talk to the Info Centre at Port Augusta (who gave us the
Flinders Ranges and Outback book and a booklet of walks in the
Ranges) and hope you get someone helpful at the Wilpena Information
Centre.
I would also recommend you do the
Bunyeroo Gorge drive from the Wilpena end, not the Brachina Gorge
end, as you are kind of going the “wrong way” if you travel from
Brachina Gorge, (as we discovered when looking at photos of the
Bunyeroo Gorge road after we had driven from the Brachina Gorge end!)
I have come to the conclusion that I am
NOT going to camp off-grid during the winter months unless we are a
lot further north. I am so sick of being cold.
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