Watarrka National Park

Watarrka National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Watarrka National Park, in the desert of the southern Northern Territory, contains Kings Canyon, a great cleft of red sandstone with walls a hundred metres high, whose rim walk is widely considered the finest day walk in central Australia, and it forms the third point of the classic triangle of the red centre, with Uluru and Alice Springs. It is about three hundred kilometres, three and a half hours by sealed road, from Uluru, and between 320 and 470 kilometres from Alice Springs, according to whether one takes the partly unsealed Mereenie loop through the West MacDonnell ranges, which requires a permit and is best done in a four-wheel drive, or the sealed highways; there are no scheduled flights, and those without a car come on coach tours, of which many run from both places, usually as part of an itinerary of two or three days. Entry requires a Northern Territory parks pass, bought online.

There is no accommodation in the park itself, but Kings Canyon Resort, seven kilometres from the canyon, has hotel rooms, a campground, fuel and restaurants, and Kings Creek Station, a cattle and camel station thirty-five kilometres away, has cabins and camping; both offer helicopter flights. The Rim Walk is a loop of six kilometres, taking three to four hours, which must be walked clockwise. It begins with a steep climb of about five hundred rough stone steps, known as Heart Attack Hill, to the top of the plateau, and then follows the edge of the canyon through a maze of sandstone domes, with side tracks to Cotterills lookout and down a wooden staircase into the Garden of Eden, a permanent waterhole shaded by cycads and river red gums in a side gorge, before crossing to the southern rim and descending. For those who cannot or, in the heat, may not do it, the Kings Creek walk, two and a half kilometres return along the floor of the canyon, is easy, and the Kathleen Springs walk, of similar length, is suitable for wheelchairs. The Giles Track links the two in twenty-two kilometres.

Visiting Watarrka National Park: what you will see

The national park was declared in 1989, the date of 2012 sometimes given being wrong, covers about 1,050 square kilometres at the western end of the George Gill range, and is jointly managed with its traditional owners, the Luritja and Arrernte people, to whom the freehold was returned, and whose name for the area, Watarrka, refers to the umbrella bush that grows there. The canyon is cut in two layers of sandstone. The upper, the Mereenie sandstone, laid down as dunes and beaches some four hundred million years ago, is hard, pure and pale, stained red on the surface by a thin film of iron oxide, and forms the sheer walls; beneath it lies the softer, older Carmichael sandstone, which the creek undermines. The plateau is cracked by two sets of vertical joints at right angles, and the canyon began as one of these cracks: water widened it, the soft rock below was washed out, and great slabs of the hard rock above, deprived of support, broke away along the joint planes and fell, leaving faces so flat and smooth that they look as though they had been cut with a wire, the southern wall, which fell most recently, being still pale and unweathered. On top of the plateau, erosion working along the same grid of joints has carved the rock into hundreds of rounded, beehive-shaped domes, separated by narrow alleys, which the Luritja see as young men of the dreaming and which guides call the lost city.

For all its harshness, the park is a refuge. The deep, shaded gorges and rock holes of the range hold water through the longest droughts, and with it some six hundred species of plants, a tenth of them rare or relict, survivors from a time, tens of thousands of years ago, when central Australia was wet: the MacDonnell ranges cycad, a squat, palm-like plant of a lineage older than the dinosaurs, individual specimens of which are several hundred years old, ferns, fig trees, and water plants, in the midst of spinifex, mulga and desert oak. The animals include the black-footed rock-wallaby, the euro, the dingo, the perentie, Australia's largest lizard, the thorny devil, the spinifex pigeon, the zebra finch, the peregrine falcon, which nests on the canyon walls, and the wedge-tailed eagle. The first European to see the range was the explorer Ernest Giles, in 1872, who named the creek after Fieldon King, one of the backers of his expedition, and the range after his brother-in-law. Cattlemen followed, and the country round about was taken up as pastoral stations, on which the Luritja worked as stockmen; the canyon remained almost unknown until a local man, Jack Cotterill, cut a track to it in 1960 and began taking tourists.

Watarrka National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open all year, but the season for central Australia is the winter half, from April to September, when the days are clear and mild, 20 to 28 degrees, and the nights cold, sometimes below freezing in June and July. From October to March it is extremely hot, regularly above 40 degrees, and the rangers then enforce a rule that on days when the forecast temperature is 36 degrees or more, walkers must begin the Rim Walk before nine in the morning, the gate at the foot of the climb being closed after that hour;

people have died of heatstroke on it. Whatever the season, the walk is best begun at sunrise, when the walls glow and the air is cool. Carry at least a litre of water for each hour of walking, wear a hat and sturdy shoes, and keep well back from the unfenced cliff edges, which are undercut and have given way. Flies are persistent in the warmer months, and a head net is a comfort. Swimming in the Garden of Eden, a sacred site, is not permitted. Rare heavy rain can close the roads. Allow a full day. Uluru is three and a half hours away.