Magnetising travelers to its sweeping white sand beaches and powder blue bays, Cape Le Grand National Park, Western Australia more than lives up to its buzz.
Rugged granite peaks slide carefully into the sea, givingup to the waves small crystalline grains of quartz that shimmer and shine as the tide rolls in. A heady seascape of blue-green, teal and baby-eye blue, this far western shoreline is so entirely bewitching that even kangaroos endeavor out of the heathlands to forage the coastline as the sun goes down.
Tucked into an dry, uninhabited corner of the nation’s southwest, Cape Le Grand National Park has long got distinctions for its gorgeous, arcing, white sand coves. Its beaches blow every visitor away, however the park’s remote place — 750km by roadway from Perth — reserves this unaffected wilderness for calm tourists, preferably with their own beds on board.
I gethere by roadway too, steering my Landcruiser through the beachfront town of Esperance in search of fresh arrangements for our week-long outdoorcamping journey. I have a vehicle complete of starving takingatrip buddies to feed. Still, I quickly collect a bounty of natural fruit and veggies, and discover newly baked sourdough bread, free-range eggs and tasty ground coffee too.
Chasing the salted, simple life
Esperance is an plain, easygoing sort of town that serves its ocean views with just-caught seafood and redwine supported from regional vines. There’s a appealing waterside of locations of consume and beverage within sight of the sea, however I insomeway withstand the desire to invest the day doing simply that, and turn the vehicle east. Less than an hour’s drive away, our primitive seaside campingsite waitsfor, appealing a much-needed piece of the salted, sandy, simple life.
Regularly called one of Australia’s most best beaches, Lucky Bay sits like a teardrop inbetween 2 stoic granite headlands, its carefully shoaling seabed showing ever more stunning tones of blue as it increases up from the depths. This enigmatic seascape collects swimmers, anglers and beachcombers, and tempts photographers from distant locations to capture the western grey kangaroos that notoriously forage the high tide mark at sunset and dawn.
I pull on running shoes and beat everybody there at veryfirst light, setting out along the Cape Le Grand Coastal Trail towards close-by Thistle Cove. Walking the whole Coastal Trail is a worthwhile day-long endeavour, however my mild 30-minute ramble is blessed with privacy. From the high granite lookout at Whistling Rock, I sit to watch the daybreak and area dolphins browsing the clear swell that peels into the cove far below.
When I lastly tear myself away and return to camp, I discover my buddies drinking coffee and strapping on boots, tailoring up for our prepared top climb of Mandooboornup. At simply 262 metres high, the park’s most available peak is far from lofty and takes less than an hour to climb. Yet the precarious climb up its curving granite flanks makes it a Grade 5 obstacle. It’s exhausting and high, however what’s got us moving so early is the fascinating cavern up on top that frames one of the finest views in the nationwide park.
I rest in the cavern after a heart-pumping climb, havingahardtime to fathom that some 40 million years ago the sea immersed this rocky lookout. Today, the ocean lies far below my feet, crashing onto the far-off, arcing sands of Hellfire and Lucky Bays. Mandooboornup is however one of the climbable peaks that type an remarkable chain of Precambrian granite and gneiss, extending throughout the park. There’s a gentler path up Mount Le Grand (Mandoowernup), the greatest peak at 345 metres, and an simple roam up 180 metre-high Mississippi Hill, both of which benefit with ocean views.
But there’s something unique about Mandooboornup, which made its pioneer-era name “Frenchman Peak” for the soldier’s cap it was stated to looklike. Forgetting Australia’s prolonged Indigenous heritage, sailors and explorers have long paidfor themselves the opportunity of relabeling popular natural landforms, and Cape Le Grand bears numerous still today.
The park’s own name keepsinmind an officer of the ship Espérance on Admiral d’Entrecasteaux’s 1792 French exploration, while Englishman Matthew Flinders relabelled Thistle Cove for John Thistle, Master of HMS Investigator. After his near-disastrous Nullarbor crossing in 1841, explorer Edward John Eyre called Rossiter Bay to pay homage to his rescuer and the captain of the whaling boat Mississippi. All of this remembers an intriguing piece of colonial maritime and checkingout history, however I choose to home in on more ancient stories.
Traditional owners the Wudjari individuals have left behind tools, middens and artefacts that display 13,000 years of profession of Cape Le Grand. But it’s their production story about this shoreline that makes it genuinely theirs. According to the tale, a giant eagle or walitj developed Mandooboornup and setdown high on its top to guard her nest. When 2 kids absconded from their seaside camp regardlessof their momsanddads’ cautioning, and took and broke the eagle’s eggs, the walitj vengefully selected up the youngboys and dropped them into