Glorious walking in the heart of Australia

Just south of Alice Springs, in the dead centre of Australia, the MacDonnell Ranges rise from the desert plains like creases on a tablecloth. With peaks up to 1,531 metres and cut through by deep gorges, these mountains are wild and spectacular, said Oliver Smith in the Financial Times.

For the region’s Aboriginal inhabitants – the Arrernte people – the place “brims with stories, sanctity and secrets”. Winding through their western half for 220km is one of the greatest hiking paths in the outback, the Larapinta Trail. Even a single day’s walking on it is a “serious undertaking”, with water available only at 13 trailheads along the way (each accessible by 4WD), and food at three (through-hikers must arrange additional drops). But for lovers of remote places and untamed nature, the effort is well worth it.

I walked sections of the trail early in the season (which runs from April to October), when the landscape was at its greenest after the summer rains. Waterholes “sparkled” and “desert oaks cast shade over wildflowers”.

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My guide was Anna Dakin, a British artist who has been leading hikes here since 2018 through Art Tours of Australia. She admires the work of the celebrated watercolourist Albert Namatjira (1902-1959), a local Arrernte man whose old house (now in a “sorry state”) we visited. Anna and I set up base camp by the Finke (believed to be the world’s oldest river), where we slept in swags (canvas bivvy bags) beside a campfire, and made day trips by 4WD to different trailheads, walking about 15km a day.

We were roused each morning by a “dawn chorus of butcherbirds and willie wagtails”. In the early light, the “terracotta” landscape was “flecked with subtle colours”, from the “silver-green spinifex” to the “red-and-blue mallee trees”. It was yet lovelier at sunset, and our walks took us to wondrous places, including the Standley Chasm – a “pocket paradise” like a cathedral nave, where cycads and lemongrass grow between towering sandstone walls.