Ginger and Ed's Excellent Adventures

The Flinders Ranges are a series of north-south trending mountains that are made up of tilted and folded sedimentary rocks. We started off in the southern end near Melrose, South Australia.

We took a hike up Mount Remarkable and enjoyed the views of expansive fields in the distance. We spotted several flowering plants.

From Melrose we drove.to Port Augusta for two nights (everyone here camps Easter weekend, which is a four day long holiday). We were scheduled for new tires for our trailer first thing Tuesday morning.

In the meantime we explored the Arid.Lands Botanical Garden in town.

We left Port Tuesday morning and heading to Wilpena Pound campground. On the way we walked to Arkaroo rock shelter, an important aboriginal rock art site.

We met some new plants along the way…

From our camp at Wilpena Pound we spent a warm blustery afternoon climbing Mount Ohlssen Bagge for a view into the Pound.

Wilpena Pound is a basin bounded by folded layers of sedimentary rock in the form.of a giant fold. While best appreciated from the air, we had a commanding view from the top.

This area is normally ver6 arid,though this year they received more than 200mm of rain in recent weeks. Everything was green and blooming, and the showers accompanying our hike brought out fragrances from the plants along the way.

One by product of all the moisture was an abundance of flies. Fortunately most do not bite and we had head nets!

From Wilpena camp we traveled north to a simpler camp along the Brachina Gorge road. There were only a few other campers and it was quiet.

One reason to camp there was the proximity of the golden spike, which is the internationally agreed upon marker for the geological boundary of the Ediacharin. This time boundary represents the earliest fossils of complex life.

We had an evening stroll up the creek by camp to look at rocks and saw a couple of yellow footed rock wallabies.

We drove to Bunyeroo Gorge for a hike through geologic time the next day. There was water in this creek, thanks to all the rain that fell recently.

Our last step was the newly created Nilpena Ediacara National Park. The site was created to preserve and showcase fossils of the earliest Ediacara age some 600 million years ago.

We took a tour which included a visit to the fossil beds where the Ediacara fauna were first discovered. It was amazing to see the fossils of the earliest complex life where they were discovered.

From here we drove back to Port Augusta for the night. The next morning we left the coastline behind and headed north on the Stuart Highway…