Australia: Western Australia – The Pinnacles Desert

🏜️ The Pinnacles Desert, Nambung National Park, Western Australia

The Pinnacles Desert sits inside Nambung National Park, which is roughly two hundred kilometres north of Perth along the Brand Highway, with a short detour west towards the coast. It is not difficult to find, and the road in is perfectly good, which is not something you can always say about destinations in this part of the world. We had been making our way up the coast by campervan — a mode of transport that combines the freedom of the open road with the domestic arrangements of a very small flat — and the Pinnacles had been on the list since we started planning the trip.

I had, like most people who have ever so much as glanced at a Western Australia tourism brochure, seen photographs of the place. They are hard to avoid. Tourism Western Australia has been putting pictures of the Pinnacles in front of people for decades, and with good reason, because the landscape photographs extraordinarily well. The images showed a scene that appeared to have been conjured up by somebody who had read rather too much science fiction and then gone for a long walk in the desert: hundreds — in fact several thousand — pale limestone spires rising out of rippling orange sand, pointing upward at the sky with an air of mild accusation. As if they had been waiting there for a very long time and were not entirely pleased about it. Some of the photographs also featured emus wandering between the formations, which seemed almost too good to be true. In our case it was. There were no emus. There were, however, plenty of spires, which is arguably the point.

🌅 Arriving at the Pinnacles

We arrived around lunchtime, parked the van in the car park, applied sunscreen with the grim efficiency of people who have learned their lesson the hard way, and walked the short trail from the car park into the main formation area. The walk itself is not demanding. This is not Everest. It is a gentle sandy path that leads you into the formations within a few minutes, which is either reassuring or slightly anticlimactic depending on your expectations.

The first thing that struck me was the colour of the sand. It was a rich, warm yellow-ochre — the sort of shade you get when a graphic designer is briefed to make something look Australian and perhaps goes slightly too far with the saturation. Against this backdrop, the limestone spires stood out with an almost theatrical clarity. They looked, frankly, extraordinary. And completely real, which after seeing so many heavily processed tourism photographs is not a given.

The formations ranged enormously in scale. Some were little more than rocky stubs barely poking above the surface, as if they had given up halfway through. Others reached three metres or more into the air, twisted and pitted and worn by millennia of wind and weather into shapes that suggested broken molars, arthritic fingers, melting candles, and in a few cases things I am too polite to describe in a family travel journal. The variety was remarkable. No two were quite the same, and wandering among them had a slightly dreamlike quality — the kind of landscape where you keep expecting something to happen, without being entirely sure what.

🔬 How on Earth Did They Get Here?

The geology behind all of this is, as it happens, genuinely interesting, even to someone who usually finds geology about as gripping as a damp afternoon in Scunthorpe.

The Pinnacles were formed from the calcium carbonate left behind by ancient coastal shell deposits. This part of Western Australia was once underwater, and the accumulated remains of billions of marine creatures — shells, coral, the usual oceanic debris — left behind thick deposits of calcium carbonate in the rock. During periods when sea levels were higher than they are today, sand dunes built up along what is now the coastline, and plant life gradually colonised and stabilised them. As the organic matter from those plants decayed over thousands of years, it produced slightly acidic groundwater. That acidic water began dissolving the calcium carbonate in the sand below, and then re-depositing it around the root systems of long-dead plants and trees. Over time, this process created hard, resistant nodules of calcrete beneath the surface. When the overlying sand was eventually blown or washed away by wind and rain over subsequent millennia, what remained were these odd, upstanding pillars — the harder material that had resisted erosion while everything around it disappeared.

The whole process took tens of thousands of years, which is genuinely humbling when you consider that the end result looks, from certain angles, like a field full of very old teeth. Nature, it turns out, has a fine sense of the absurd.

The formations that are visible today are thought to have been exposed somewhere between six thousand and thirty thousand years ago, give or take, depending on which part of the field you are looking at. The desert has not always looked the way it does now. In wetter periods, vegetation would have covered the area again, and some of the spires would have been hidden once more. It is a landscape that comes and goes on a geological timescale, which puts our brief lunchtime visit into something of a perspective.

🪶 The Noongar People and the Pinnacles

Long before European navigators noted the formations from their ships, the Noongar people of the south-west of Western Australia knew this landscape intimately. The Noongar have lived in this region for at least forty-five thousand years, making them one of the oldest continuous cultures on earth — a fact that tends to make the entire history of European settlement feel rather brief and presumptuous by comparison.

Oral traditions suggest that the Pinnacles held spiritual significance for the Noongar people. The formations were understood within the framework of ancestral stories — the kind of deep cultural knowledge that connects landscape, history, and identity in ways that are difficult to fully appreciate as an outsider. The spires were not simply geological curiosities. They were part of a living narrative about the land and its meaning.

The first documented European to take note of the Pinnacles was the Dutch navigator Willem de Vlamingh, who sailed along this stretch of coast in 1696. De Vlamingh was one of the more notable figures of the Dutch East India Company’s explorations of the Western Australian coastline — he was also the man who named the Swan River after the black swans he observed there, which goes to show that he was at least paying attention. He recorded strange formations visible from the coast, though whether he went ashore and had a proper look is not entirely clear from the historical record.

After de Vlamingh, the Pinnacles largely escaped sustained European attention for a very long time. The area was remote, the coast was inhospitable, and there were no obvious commercial reasons to go poking around in the desert. It was not until the 1960s that the formations attracted serious scientific study and began to feature on the emerging tourist trail. Nambung National Park was gazetted in 1967, which was when the Western Australian government formally decided that the place was worth protecting. Tourism infrastructure developed steadily from there, and today the park receives several hundred thousand visitors a year, which is an extraordinary figure for somewhere that is essentially a field of pointy rocks in a fairly remote stretch of coastline.

🚗 The Driving Loop and the Etiquette Problem

The park operates a circular driving loop through the formations for those who find the prospect of walking through soft sand on a warm afternoon rather less appealing than it sounds in theory. This is a perfectly sensible arrangement, and most visitors use it at some point. The road takes you through the heart of the formation area, with pull-offs where you can stop, get out, look around, take photographs, and return to your air-conditioned vehicle without having to commit to anything too energetic.

We walked a good portion of it, which I mention only to establish that we are the sort of people who make an effort, before also admitting that we did use the van for part of it because the sand gets deep in places and my knees are not what they were.

There were a reasonable number of other visitors about, which at lunchtime in a popular national park is entirely to be expected. Most of them were behaving perfectly well — walking the trails, taking photographs, observing the formations with appropriate wonder and without touching anything they shouldn’t. A civilised group on the whole.

Some, however, were not.

The signs throughout the park are clear on the matter of touching and leaning on the formations. They are not ambiguous signs. They do not say “we would prefer it if you perhaps considered not touching these, if that’s alright with you.” They say, more or less, do not touch. The reason for this is straightforward enough: human contact transfers oils and other contaminants onto the limestone, which accelerates the weathering of rock that is already, after thousands of years of wind and rain, somewhat fragile. Pressing yourself against a Pinnacle for a photograph does not seem like a devastating act, but multiply it by several hundred thousand visitors a year over several decades and the cumulative effect is not trivial.

This apparently straightforward message is, for a certain subset of visitors, essentially optional. There is always a contingent for whom a sign reading “please do not touch” functions as an interesting suggestion rather than a firm instruction, particularly when the rock in question would make an excellent backdrop for a social media photograph. Karen, who has many admirable qualities, including the patience of a woman who has entirely run out of patience for this sort of thing, noticed a couple engaged in exactly this sort of activity and approached them. She pointed out, with considerable politeness but no ambiguity whatsoever, that they probably should not be doing what they were doing.

The response was mixed. I shall leave it at that.

Karen felt, on reflection, that the signs could be bigger.

💭 Reflections

The Pinnacles were genuinely worth the detour. I say this as someone who had, over the years, been slightly concerned that the reality might not live up to the photographs. It did. The scale of the place, the colour of the sand, the variety of the formations — all of it was better in person than in any image I had seen.

There was also something quietly affecting about knowing that the landscape had been forming for tens of thousands of years, and that people had been living with it and finding meaning in it for the vast majority of that time. We were there for about two hours. The Noongar were there for forty-five thousand years. That is a gap in experience that does not bear too much thinking about.

If you are driving north up the Western Australian coast, the Pinnacles are not hard to include and they are well worth the small effort it takes. Take water. Use sunscreen. Read the signs. Do not touch the rocks.

Karen will be watching.