MacDonnell Ranges

The MacDonnell Ranges are what happen when an ancient mountain system — once as high as the Himalayas, now reduced by 350 million years of erosion to ridges 200 to 400 metres above the plain — is crossed by rivers that predate the mountains themselves. The rivers carved their gorges first, and as the land rose around them, they cut down to keep pace. The result is a series of narrow, deep gorges that slice through the quartzite ridgelines at right angles, their walls sometimes barely a car-width apart, the rock layers inside them tilted at dramatic angles that record the geological violence of their making. All of this is forty minutes from Alice Springs.

Simpsons Gap is the closest and most visited gorge — twenty-two kilometres west of town on a sealed road — and it is best in the early morning before the heat arrives. The gap itself is narrow enough that the walls shade the floor almost all day; a waterhole at the base holds water year-round, and the black-footed rock wallabies that live in the cliff crevices come down to drink at dawn. I sat on a boulder at 6:30 a.m. and watched four of them pick their way down the cliff face with a confidence in their feet that I found humbling. The ghost gums growing from the pale gravel at the waterhole edge were white-barked and vivid, their leaves hanging in the still morning air.

Standley Chasm, thirty-three kilometres further west, opens precisely at midday. This is not a tourist conceit but a physical fact — the sun reaches the floor of the chasm, which is only nine metres wide and 80 metres deep, only in the hour around noon, and when it does the orange quartzite walls light up with a colour that seems operationally impossible for a natural substance. I had been told this and arrived somewhat sceptical. I stood in the chasm at 12:15 p.m. and the walls were orange — not red, not ochre, but a saturated orange that appeared to emanate from inside the rock — and the shadow line moved visibly down the wall above me while I watched. I stayed for an hour.

Ormiston Gorge, 135 kilometres west of Alice Springs, requires a longer drive but delivers the most complete experience of the ranges. The gorge is wider than the others, the walls higher, the waterhole larger — deep enough to swim in through most of the year. The Larapinta Trail, which runs the full 223-kilometre length of the western MacDonnell Ranges, passes through Ormiston and the hike to the Ghost Gum Lookout above the gorge gives you the ranges as they appear from above: ridge after parallel ridge running east-west across the landscape, the gaps between them showing as dark interruptions in the line of red rock.

The Arrernte people have lived in and around the MacDonnell Ranges for at least 30,000 years; the western ranges are the country of the Arrarnta, and the gorges are significant sites in the Western Arrernte Dreaming. The cultural centre at Glen Helen Lodge, near Ormiston, provides some context for this, though the most meaningful learning I did was through the West MacDonnell ranger who led an interpretive walk through Simpsons Gap and spoke about the plant use, the water sources, the seasonal movements of the people who called this impossible-looking landscape home through all recorded human time.

The ghost gums — Corymbia aparrerinja in the Arrernte naming — are the visual signature of the ranges, their white trunks standing against red rock with a combination that should be garish but is instead one of the more affecting colour pairings I have seen in nature. The Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira spent his career painting them. Looking at the real thing, the paintings stop seeming like an artistic choice and start seeming like inevitability.

When to go: May through September is the dry season and the most comfortable for walking — cool mornings, warm afternoons, clear skies. The Larapinta Trail is best walked April through June or August through October; the heat either side of these windows makes multi-day walking genuinely hazardous. Standley Chasm is worth the visit year-round for the noon light effect. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 45°C in the ranges — always carry more water than you think you need.