Store, Old Walpina Station
Once again today we hiked in the morning before it got too hot. We walked to the Old Wilpena Station, though there isn’t really a trail to it that is marked from the information booth so we just followed the road. Along the way we walked in to the solar power station which is used to generate the electricity for the Wilpena resort and campground. It has about 70 solar panels, several buildings which house storage batteries, and a diesel generator for backup. It can produce about 100 KVA, and at the time of its construction in 1988 was the largest solar power plant in Australia (however, there are several larger ones now, and some that are massive being planned).
We saw a large number of red kangaroos this morning as we hiked to the Old Wilpena Station. They were lying in the shade of trees, and as we came too close they would first become erect and look at us, and then often bounded away, but not far, just to the shade of another tree a bit farther away. The station buildings form a historical display of how a working pastoral station was arranged, with interpretive signs. There were massive red gum trees, probably the largest we’ve seen by some of the buildings and along the creek, some more than two metres in diameter at the base.
After we’d looked at the buildings we walked back to the campground along a dirt road that leaves from the back of the station. A way down this road there was a junction with the Heysen (walking) and Mawson (biking) trails and we followed this back to the campground. The trail leaves from the north west corner of the campground in the unpowered tenting sites, but it isn’t clearly marked until you get right to the gate where it starts.
Yellow throated Honeyeater
This afternoon I arranged to get the windscreen in our motorhome replaced when we are in Melbourne in two weeks. I also photographed a number of the different kinds of birds that are here. There are honey eaters which are out in the heat of the afternoon and they eat at the blossoms of the eucalyptus trees. Later on in the day there are other birds including a large number of Australian Ringnecked Parrots.