With some of the most northerly and westerly snow gums in Australia, the rare subalpine gem of mount Kaputar National Park offers quiet camping, awesome lookouts and some odd little creatures.
Story By Ken Eastwood
Long before the earth’s molten core erupted with searing heat and explosive power to raise up Mount Macedon in Victoria or the Warrumbungles in New South Wales, it disgorged its fiery contents at Mount Kaputar in northern New South Wales. For four million years, volcanoes boomed and thundered, reshaping the landscape forever, and creating a towering mountain range some 2.5 kilometres high.
Now, some 20 million years later, Mount Kaputar National Park is one of the hidden gems of outback New South Wales – a spectacular park that surprisingly isn’t widely known. It’s a wild and rugged landscape of volcanic dykes and plugs and plunging cliff lines, but also has beauty in its flower-filled subalpine meadows and summit eyries with views over the upthrust Nandewar Range and the wide western plains. There are ribbon gums and snowgrasses, mountain gums, moss-filled woodlands and abundant wildlife, with wallaroos and wallabies, echidnas and koalas, honeyeaters and parrots.
This story excerpt is from Issue #90
Outback Magazine: Aug/Sept 2013
