Travellers venturing from Adelaide to Port Augusta along the Princes Highway will pass the turn-off to Mt Remarkable National Park about 45 km north of Port Pirie.
Remarkable by name and remarkable by nature, this 18,000-hectare park is renowned for its dramatic scenery, dense vegetation and abundant wildlife and receives an estimated 50,000 visitors annually. In fact, it is the largest and most visited national park in the Flinders Ranges.
Located between Spencer Gulf and the Southern Flinders Ranges, the park’s steeply folded ranges comprise a bioregion of enormous conservation significance for straddling the overlap between the state’s arid inland and its wetter, more temperate coastal fringe.
The 800 million year old sandstone that underlies the region has been transformed by unimaginable forces into an undulating landscape of fractured spines and weathered spurs, exposed red quartzite cliffs, scree slopes of huge angular boulders and prominent rocky summits with names like The Pinnacle, Gibraltar Rock and, of course, its 960-metre namesake Mt Remarkable. Three watercourses – Alligator, Mambray and Spring Creeks – drain the park through wooded valleys and towering gorges with features called The Terraces and The Narrows.
Full article in January’16 issue of On The Road magazine.