Moralana Scenic Drive

After our early morning adventure Hot Air Ballooning we thought be better get a move on and do something. Didn’t much feel like walking, early (4am) morning + long walk = fall over asleep!! We have nothing against walking, we just weren’t “feeling” it after such an early start to the day.

We headed to the Rawnsley Park reception to get some maps of the area and find out where would be good for a nice scenic drive. With that said a lot of the scenery around this end of the Flinders is fairly similar. The receptionist suggested the “Moralana Scenic Drive” then connecting with the “Brachina Gorge”. We had driven a long some of the Brachina Gorge the day before with Paul from Wallaby tracks, trying to spot some Yellow-footed rock-wallabies.

We headed off with a car full of yummy drinks and food (in case we got lost of course!). Moralana Scenic Drive is a stretch of 28km dirt road between Wilpena road and the Leigh creek road.  Along this road you will see the southern wall of Wilpena Pound, the ABC ranges, Black Gap Lookout (which you have to walk to, we drove there and didn’t see much.. again too lazy to walk!), Elder Range and much more!

The Moralana drive is quite and peaceful. The scenery of the surrounding ranges in really quite beautiful!

We stopped in the Brachina Gorge to have some lunch. Next minute a medium sizes Yellow-footed rock-wallaby hopped past, but that’s a whole different story (Having Lunch with a Yellow-footed rock-wallaby)

After that we packed up and headed back off, once again stopping every 5 mins for photo ops, remember to take spare batteries for your camera, there is nothing more annoying than running flat and then coming across the perfect photo.

We went past the Appealinna Ruins and found that there was a large group of people fixing up the wall, as it stood “back in the day”. The ruins have little plagues to explain what the home was used for and a little bit of history of the place. To me it just sounded like a lot of family drama with one person burning down someone else’s home, and firing people etc It was an angry time with land owners and miners. Long story short… the water hole was on the farmers property, the miner wanted the water for their cattle etc…trouble entails

From there we decided to head back to Rawnsley for a nice cold drink and a relax before dinner… we were starting to feel the affects of waking up at 4am and the excitement of the hot air ballooning has worn off. On the way back we stopped off at “Stokes Hill” look out, which actually overlooks some of Willow Spring station. We met a couple there who has been standing/sitting there for over an hour waiting for the best light for “the perfect photo”, taken on one of the “old school” cameras. When the light was right, they took ONE photo and packed up and left, That is dedication (they wouldnt even be able to see what it turned out like untill they were back at the caravan (which was also their darkroom) to develop it)! We use a Cannon DSLR and take thousands of pictures, in hopes that one has the right lighting… I don’t have the patients to freeze my butt off to take one photo – sorry guys.

You can also see the ABC ranges and Wilpena pound from this look out. It would be a great place for bubbles or cocktails at sunset but it pretty windy and chilly the day we were there, that and we didn’t have any bubbles.