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South Australia. Hiking Northern Flinders Ranges.

South Australia. Hiking Northern Flinders Ranges.

Michael Gebicki follows a trail back to the dawn of life on Earth, in South Australia's Flinders Ranges.

I'VE only stopped for a moment in the rock-strewn bed of Ten Mile Creek to tie my bootlaces and when I look up, my companions have disappeared. It's taken me no more than 30 seconds but they're gone - four sturdy walkers, swallowed up in a wilderness of scorched red rock as decisively as those flouncy young misses in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Very few walkers come along the remote Wilkawillina walking trail on the eastern side of South Australia's Flinders Ranges and the trail is barely a faint scrape among the mulga. I've lost the thread and in no time I'm tripping over rocks and flood debris caught up in the white tea-trees.

A yellow-footed rock wallaby.

A yellow-footed rock wallaby.Credit: SATC

It's not a problem. Bracketed by the steep walls of Wilkawillina Gorge on either side, the trail follows the creek. It can't be more than 25 metres above me but point taken. If you're going walking in remote parts of the Flinders Ranges, better go with someone who knows the way.

The Flinders Ranges is one of the most sensational outback national parks in the country. Surrounded by the arid wasteland of the great salt lakes, an ancient seabed has been sculpted by millions of years of rain and sun into a fractured, furrowed landscape of deep valleys covered with desert oak and cypress pines, which fall into creeks lined with river red gums. If you want a taste of outback in all its seared, heart-strumming majesty, the Flinders are in a class apart.

Most visitors tackle the region on a self-drive tour and as long as you're behind the wheel of a four-wheel-drive, this is a great way to go. But the Flinders Ranges save their very best for those prepared to absorb it through their soles.

The Prairie Hotel.

The Prairie Hotel.Credit: Michael Gebicki

I'm with a guided group organised by Australian Walking Tours. It's a three-day taster for AWT's Fabulous Flinders walk, a six-day, small-group escorted odyssey that begins and ends in Adelaide and stitches together the best of the walking trails in the Central Flinders Ranges.

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The most striking feature of these ranges is Wilpena Pound, the destination for our first day's walk.

It's mid-morning when we turn off the road from Hawker, southern gateway to the Central Flinders, and onto the Moralana Scenic Drive. After a jolting 10-minute ride, we pull into the parking lot at Black Gap, fill our water bottles and set off along the dry creek bed. This is a point-to-point walk, not a loop track.

Many of the finest walks in the Flinders are point-to-point and, unless you have a vehicle parked at either end of the track or you're on a guided walk with a dedicated driver for the drop-off and pick-up, you won't be doing any of them.

As we walk, Ben Griffiths, our guide, picks his way unerringly through the low vegetation, pointing out the "grandparent" callitris pines that form the nucleus of a new community of trees. It's been a wet winter. In half-a-dozen trips into the Flinders, I've never seen these hills so lush.

The trees are tipped with new growth and western grey kangaroos bound across the hillsides. Once we pass within 25 metres of a small family of kangaroos sunning themselves in a clearing and they barely stir. The heavy winter rains bring the promise of a vivid wildflower season in September, when Australian Walking Tours kicks its Flinders Walks program into high gear.

Although it's July and the depths of winter, the weather is sunny and calm. It's ideal for walking, with just a light fleece required to blunt the cooling breeze. Conditions for walkers are perfect until about October, when daytime temperatures begin to soar. At the height of summer, the rocks radiate blistering heat and even snakes get sunstroke.

The trail climbs steadily towards the rim of Wilpena Pound but the ankle-twisting rocks shed from the disintegrating sandstone hills above require constant attention. It takes us more than an hour to crest the hill at Bridle Gap, from where we look down into Wilpena Pound, an oval bowl ringed by sharp quartzite peaks that slope gently upward on the inside and fall away in sheer cliffs on the outside.

Once over the lip and down the other side, the walking becomes progressively easier until finally, the flat sandy bottom of the pound puts wings on our feet. It takes barely 90 minutes to cover the seven kilometres to the Hills Homestead, once the property of the pioneering family that struggled to graze sheep inside the pound. In that time we've not seen another walker.

The next day we tackle Wilkawillina Gorge. This is a very different walk, alongside the dry bed of Ten Mile Creek for the most part and into the steep-walled gorge itself, followed by a panting climb to a saddle on the Bunkers Range and a traverse descent across a steep hillside. It's a day of red-walled gorges reflected in reed-rimmed pools and hillsides that have been heaved into the air and cleaved open, a day when the remarkable geology of the Flinders Ranges hits us like a smack in the face.

Although they run for more than 400 kilometres, the Flinders Ranges are more molehills than mountains. They crest at a maximum height of just 1168 metres, yet these are no ordinary hills. Shoved into the sky by colliding tectonic plates, most mountains are a closed book. They go up, they go down, end of story. Lovely to behold maybe but, like a rosebud closed tight, they keep their secrets to themselves.

But the Flinders Ranges are the rose in full flower. These are mountains that have literally peeled open, split apart by time, sun, ice and water to reveal their contents to the world. Layer by layer they are an open book and every page of that book tells an amazing story that stretches back more than 1000 million years and records the dawn of life on Earth.

What remains in the hills and gorges of the Flinders is a cross-section of the last billion years of our planet's history. In this stone, you can plainly see the ripples left from the time when most of Australia was covered by a shallow sea. Evidence remains of the glaciation that covered much of Australia 75 million years ago.

In the depths of Ten Mile Creek, just before we leave to climb out across the range, Griffiths points out a limestone boulder embedded with fossils of the coral or sponge-like archaeocyatha, the first multicell animals, from about 500 million years ago.

This discovery proved a game-changer for world paleontology when it was unearthed near here in the 1940s. They're tiny and faint and it takes a while before we spot the first one but once our eyes are honed, we quickly find another and another, until a whole galaxy of these tiny animals appears, the earliest evidence of a great leap forward on the evolutionary trail.

"And now," Griffiths says, "we can go and have a cold beer," and all agreed it was miraculous that evolution had brought us such wonders.

The writer was a guest of Australian Walking Tours.

Pub with no peer

On the parched plains that flank the western edges of the Flinders Ranges, the Prairie Hotel at Parachilna is a chunk of Australia straight out of outback mythology. So evocative is the stone and corrugated-iron hotel and its surroundings that it has become a favourite with cinematographers looking to add a touch of outback realism to their work.

As a base for exploring the Flinders Ranges, there is nowhere better. At the heart of the historic hotel, the recently renovated heritage rooms are neat, spacious and equipped with en suites. The modern wing at the back of the hotel features larger deluxe rooms, sunk waist-deep into the ground to take advantage of natural insulation.

The Prairie Hotel's specialty is bush food of the four-legged kind. The menu lists such exotic possibilities as camel sirloin and an emu egg and vegetable frittata, or the signature feral mixed grill, a plate of roo filet, goat chop, camel sausage and emu pattie.

Decor is highly individual. On the walls are a selection of works by painter Peter Coad. One, with a red "Sold" sticker, carries a price tag of $18,000, which says a lot about the Prairie's clientele.

Nights at the Prairie are never dull. Guests are encouraged to mingle and you're never quite sure whether the person on the next bar stool might be a mining magnate, a filmmaker scouting locations, an eminent landscape painter or a ringer from one of the local stations. Presiding over the Prairie's amiable and eccentric cast and crew are Jane and Ross Fargher, legends in these parts, who inject the hotel with style, personality and a free-flowing party spirit.

In October this year, the hotel will host Fossils Rock, a highlight of the campaign to raise funds for a proposed interpretative centre showcasing Ediacara fossils. The event will star Leo Sayer and among the invitees is Sir David Attenborough, who was filmed here with the Ediacara fossils for the BBC's First Life TV series, which screened on the ABC earlier this year.

(08) 8648 4844, prairiehotel.com.au.

Five must-do's in the Flinders

1 Flight over Wilpena Pound. From the air, the patterns in the landscape of upthrust hills and chiselled rock layers take on new meaning. Best shortly after sunrise.

2 Chambers Gorge. Cupped in sun-blistered hands, a rock wall within this scenic gorge is inscribed with the park's most impressive Aboriginal rock art.

3 Yellow-footed rock wallabies. These small, agile wallabies with their striped bushy tails are one of the most appealing of all the marsupial species. Often seen in Brachina Gorge when they come down to drink just before sunset.

4 Moralana Scenic Drive. Wanders through a spectacular landscape of river red gums at the foot of the southern wall of Wilpena Pound. Drive with the sun behind you, either in the early morning or late afternoon.

5 Sunset on the Great Wall of China. The bare stone ramparts that crown this stark hill just south of Blinman catch fire from the dying sun.

Trip notes

Getting there

Hawker, the gateway to the Central Flinders Ranges, is 430 kilometres north of Adelaide.

Walking there

Australian Walking Tours' Fabulous Flinders is an all-inclusive, fully escorted walk with a maximum group size of 10, beginning and ending in Adelaide. Tours depart until mid-October. The price is $2850 a person. (03) 5364 2977, australianwalkingtours.com.au.

More information

southaustralia.com.

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