Carnarvon Gorge National Park

We have spent the past three days camped at Sandstone Park. It's a new camping facility about 6 km from the Carnarvon Gorge Visitor Centre at the start of the gorge walking tracks. There are 41 very large sites with 360-degree views of the surrounding countryside.

There are no powered sites here with the only facilities being portaloos spread throughout the site, a dump point and fire pits to each site. They have also done away with the stupid nonsense of retaining your greywater, and are happy for it to flow onto the ground where it's badly needed. Daily fees are currently $23 per site.

This new tourist enterprise is situated on Bandana Station which comprises 43,000 acres and borders the national park. The station is now organic and normally averages about 2200 head of cattle.

This is our third visit to Carnarvon Gorge with our last visit in August 1997. Back then camping was allowed all year round in the national park but it's now been limited to just school holiday periods.

On our second day, we walked as far as Cathedral Gorge which involved the crossing of Carnarvon Creek a total of forty times. 

The return distance to the visitor centre is 18.2 kilometres. Of course, there are the many interesting sites that branch off the main track, which blows this distance out by many more kilometres.

Some of the side trips include sites like Wards Canyon which is a very steep climb which really gets the blood flowing with its hundred-odd steps that finally takes you into a side gorge, that shelters the worlds largest fern, the king fern.

Then there is the Moss Garden where water is constantly dripping from the sandstone for the mosses and ferns that survive here.

The amphitheatre is a 60-metre high chamber gouged out by running water over thousands of years.

On our last day, we paid what we thought was a very reasonable $165 for three of us to enjoy a twenty-minute flight over 'Bandana Station' and Molleyamber Gorge.