Finke Gorge National Park/Palm Valley

Northern Territory

Finke Gorge National Park

Finke Gorge National Park covers an area of 46,000 hectares and includes Palm Valley. The park is 138 km (about 2 hours drive) west of Alice Springs and is west of and close to Hermannsburg. Here are some typical scenes from the park.

The plant in the second photo from the left is widely called "spinifex" but technically is Triodia, a pointy, hummock-forming grass that is extremely common in Central Australia. (True spinifex is a coastal plant and a different genus.) The variety shown here is Triodia basedowii, which is blue-gray. You need to watch out for this stuff when you hike, especially in shorts. Spinifex resin is an important plant for the Aborigines and is used as an adhesive in spear-making, among other applications. Its seeds are ground to make cakes, and it is used for smoke signals, as it produces a strong black smoke.

Palm Valley

"Our trip to Palm Valley was with AAT Kings, which seems to be the largest tour company in Australia, and certainly the largest we travelled with on this trip. The vehicle wa sa 4WD bus: a truck bed with a bus body on it. I've never seen anything like it, but it worked just fine." - Larry the O mlog

Left to right: Welcome sign, AAT Kings bus, rest spot where we had lunch.

"The Palm Valley is in the MacDonnell Ranges outside of Alice. The entire area was, at one tine, an inland sea, and there are still remnants of that history if several hundred million years ago. (In fact, rock in the area has been carbon-dated as the oldest ever found on the planet.)

"The Palm Valley is a rather small river (the rivers in the Red Centre are usually dry but become wet with a vengeance when it rains, turning into raging torrents. Although not used here, 'wadi' is the common word for dry rivers like these) that features unusually lush growth for a semi-arid region (technically, it gets too much rainfall to be considered desert), including the red cabbage palm, which grows nowhere else on Earth.

"How do palm trees live where there is virtually no water or soil? They live in a riverbed where silt has been deposited over time from when rain does fall and water flows. Beneath the silt is sandstone, which holds water, under which is a layer of denser rock that will not pass water, thus creating a water table. Further, the walls of the small canyon that is Palm Valley are also sandstone, which holds the water and then slowly releases it. Thus, this little, dry canyon has plenty of growth in it.

"Oone other distinguishing characteristic of the Palm Valley area is that it contains more varieties of ants than anywhere else on the planet, over 300 different varieties. Ant scholars come from all over the world to study the little buggers here. That's nice for them." - Larry the O mlog

A Hike Among the Red Cabbage Palms

About 300 million years ago, this area was a rainforest, and like some other rainforests of the time, it had red cabbage palms. Today, these palms are extinct except in Palm Valley, in Australia's Northern Territory.

Our first hike took us atop a ridge, then along a path to the bottom and back along the base of the ridge to the tour bus. At second row, center is Triodia pungens, a green variety of spinifex. You get a good view of the rare red cabbage palms in several of these photos (see the third row). That's papyus at the bottom right.