The road to Cave Hill east off Victoria Rock Road is a big, wide, open, reasonably well-maintained, dirt road although it can be difficult to negotiate after rain.

We travelled to Cave Hill during easter 2018. On arrival we checked out a few campsites before selecting a great location, although not very sheltered from the howling wind.

The threatening weather had blown over by morning and we set off to climb the rock, see the ‘cave’ and find the three water supply reservoirs.

Cave Hill has a huge tafone. Kings Cave at Elachbutting Rock is another equally impressive exemplar of a tafone. Kata Tjuta and Uluru are two of the best known rocks with tafoni.

The cave/tafone at Cave Hill is supposedly unsafe and it is imminent danger of collapse. Imminent in manmade terms is just the Department of Parks and Wildlife (DPaW) covering their collective bureaucratic backside. Imminent in geological terms could be a few million years.

Time to find the three dams.

An extensive network of harvest walls were built to channel the runoff into various dams, as required.

Fences were built to keep animals out of the water supply.

On my way down the rock I found a quartz interstice, common in granite rock outcrops in south-west Australia. They are formed when disparate liquid rocks cool at different rates. This one was of interest because of its unusual width.

The lonely, derelict fenceposts are a sad reminder of times past.

Leaving Cave Hill we took the track north to Burra Rock. This track is a poorly engineered road with at least four bends that ‘tighten’ as one negotiates them (instead of ‘loosening’) and one ‘reverse-camber’ bend. A trap for the unwary. The surface of the road is, however, ok.

We departed Burra Rock, headed for Coolgardie.

 

 

© Kim Epton 2018-2024
418 words, 11 photographs, one image.

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