Dhilba Guuranda (Innes) National Park

---

Today we explored the Dhilba Guuranda (Innes) National Park. We purchased ingredients in Yorketown to make our own dinner tonight, but for some reason we failed to buy bread and sandwich fillings, despite discussing that we would take lunch into the park with us. That meant a quick trip to the Marion Bay General Store to buy sandwich fixings at marked up prices before we drove into the park!! D’Oh.



We had already purchased our National Park Passes online so we were ready to start exploring. Our first stop was at Stenhouse Bay which features the old jetty and a lookout walk. When we arrived in the parking area there was a van/motor home practicing some freestyle parking, parked right in the middle of the parking area which was a bit bewildering as parking bays were, we thought, clearly marked.



We proceeded along the Lookout Walk and soon encountered a woman with not one, not two, but THREE dogs IN A NATIONAL PARK!!! What the? Even worse than that, two of the dogs were off lead!! The two off lead dogs rushed at us with the woman calling out ‘It’s OK, they’re friendly’. So what, they shouldn’t be in the park! Having just seen a couple of kangaroos, I was incensed, so Googled the phone number for the park and rang to report her. The person who answered was pretty shocked too and said she would send a Ranger straight away. Good to her word we saw a Ranger arrive in a Ute within minutes and we hope the woman was fined and evicted from the National Park!



Excitement over, we completed the Lookout Walk Loop before walking out to the view point above the old jetty. Before being declared a National Park, Stenhouse Bay was just one of a number of settlements in the area during its gypsum-mining era in the early 1900s.



Continuing along the Pondalowie Road we stopped for a quick photo of Chinamans Hat Island with Althorpe Island behind it. Our next activity was a short walk out to the Cape Spencer Lighthouse. These geographical points were named by Matthew Flinders in March 1802 during his circumnavigation of Australia aboard the HMS Investigator. Allegedly he named them after one of his sponsors George Spencer, the 2^nd Earl Spencer also known as Viscount Althorp.



Our next stop was at the Inneston Historic Township where we walked around the ruins of the once thriving settlement. The township sits beside Inneston Lake from which they mined the gypsum that was hauled by horses along a wooden railway line to Stenhouse Bay for shipping to Adelaide and beyond. While some buildings are enigmatic ruins there are some that have been restored to a standard where they can be let out to holiday-makers who want to stay inside the park.



Next we drove out to the westernmost point of the Yorke Peninsula, West Cape. We found a picnic shelter and put together our ham and cheese white-bread sandwiches. I cannot remember the last time we made white-bread sandwiches, but our choices were limited this morning a the general store! It was especially difficult when there were other day trippers, much more organised than us, who were barbecuing!!! Seriously, they had their gas hot plate and they were frying up sausages for lunch. After lunch we walked out to the West Cape Lighthouse which has a shape that I thought was rather like a baobab tree. It never ceases to amaze me the wide variety of shapes, sizes and materials in which lighthouse are built.



After a stop at Pondalowie Bay, where we watched the surfers catching some waves, we left the paved road behind us and continued along Browns Beach Road to the end of the road at Browns Beach. The only way to continue beyond this point is to hike to Gym Beach Road through dense mallee vegetation. With this being an 11km/4hrs return hike we decided to give that a miss. The longer hikes in the park would really require a stay of more than two nights in the area. Maybe another time??



On our way out of the park we made one last stop at Ethel Beach to have a look at the remains of two shipwrecks, the Ethel and the SS Ferret. This was a bit disappointing as there was very little of the Ethel to be seen and nothing at all of the SS Ferret. In a quirky twist of fate the SS Ferret was the first vessel on the scene when the Ethel ran onto the beach in 1904. Seventeen years later the SS Ferret met its end on the same beach.



Steps for the day: 17,914 (12.2km)

---