Cathedral Rock – night of the warrigal

Jutting out of the New England tableland is Cathedral Rock National Park – a place of peppermint gums, stringybark and swamp land broken by peaks built of granite boulders teetering skyward. Off-track walking here is a battle against tough banskia, heath scrub and sedges all vying for space in a bewildering and yet enticing maze of rock outcrops, sudden drop-offs and blockages, inaccessible wet gullies and dead-end granite alleys that force slow detours and rethinks.

We have visited Cathedral Rock many times, it is a winter favourite where frost casts a white morning shadow across the low swamps and the skies are clear, the stars immense. In winter, surprisingly enough, wildlife is also at its most active. Superb lyrebird song is everywhere. It is breeding season, therefore performance season. And, we discovered on this trip, it is also breeding season for the park's rare population of pure dingoes. 

But, I am getting ahead of myself. Firstly, this walk started with a desire – to get a close-up look at three distinctive but unnamed granite peaks that promised expansive views and a ‘picnic at hanging rock’ type experience wandering through their quiet jumbled landscape. 

We began our exploratory walk at Native Dog Creek campground, located off the Ebor to Guyra Road. We started by taking the Warrigal Walk, a short loop track named for the local Aboriginal word for dingo. Cathedral Rock National Park has been listed as a dingo management area due the large population of pure dingoes within the park. We stopped briefly at an interpretive sign on the track but time was pushing on and before long, as is our want, we were off the track and the signs were all gone.

The faint ridge we followed was covered in low flowering urn heath, dwarf geebung, holly grevillea and prickly moses. It was a slow, prickly, 4.5km walk. The unbending toughness of the flora made it feel more like an intimate dance with nature, reaching to grab and swing away from every tree and hold back the whips and gropes of shrubbery; stepping over and under and between conesticks and crinkle bush. 

At one point, coming out onto a jutting granite boulder, we could see up the valley of Sandy Creek but where there should have been three peaks in sight, we could see only two. Pushing on, the perspective changed. Suddenly, there seemed to be only one peak. To try and sort things out we climbed up into a saddle beside the one remaining peak. It turned out to be a trick of distance and treeline and granite hide-and-seek. A quick scout around made us realise we had one peak either side and the third peak hidden behind both. Proximity had reduced their might. A camouflage of tall manna gums and messmate, under-laid with silver wattle, distorted things further.

We decided to press our way up onto the right hand peak. The left peak appeared to have a lower summit and more sheer-sided rocks that looked impossible to scale. It was a dance again, a tricky stepping left and weaving right until we were forced to drop our packs in a nook between boulders. This spot looked like it might prove a good bivvy site unless we found something higher. The last part of the climb had Caz scaling large boulders, gripping easily on the rough granite, with me crawling through a dark tunnel between and beneath the rocks. We crept past mountain tea trees until we found a high point with views to our third peak, now visible and catching the warm afternoon light.

Cathedral Rock National Park, even though only small (10,920 hectares), is one of the few remaining tracts of naturally vegetated land on the New England Tablelands having never been cleared for farming or actively logged. The altitude of the park varies from 1,100m to 1,584m above sea level at the summit of Round Mountain - the highest point on the New England Tablelands.

That night, sitting as high as we could get on our rocky peak, looking across to the impressive Woolpack Rocks, the wilderness that the national park protects sent out a chilling call. Up and down the valley below us, in the very gullies and swamps we had skirted around that morning, dingoes howled. They drew closer to our peak, drew away again. From at least six different locations they called to each other. Their howls carried through the cold night air. I imagined them picking up our scent, hunting us patiently, seeking out a camper’s unwatched bag of food with its treats and nibbles. We were high up. The large rocks afforded us some protection. For an hour, until just after sunset, we could track their progress below us - howling, howling, howling, encircling our peak.

In the morning, it was mating lyrebirds turn to call: rosellas and kookaburras and cockatoos and pigeons and who knows what other strange birdcalls summonsed to their cause. One mimicked up a honeyeater from the valley behind us, one sent up yellowtails from the north.

To reinforce the winter mood, a smashing southerly wind of ice-laden moisture was whipping through gaps in the rocks, between the onion-skinning granite.

We spent the morning exploring all three peaks, crawling through crevices, dodging the wind as we bouldered around high points and leapt across ledges, our shoes sticking easily to the granite with its perfect friction. To get back to the car we decided to return along a slightly different route, following a distinct ridgeline of rocky outcrops. The walking was more open with long slabs of granite to drift along. We snuck up quietly on some glossy-black cockatoos feeding on the seeds of the forest oaks. We followed Sandy Creek to the main road, followed the main road to Native Dog Creek, followed that creek back to the Warrigal Track and followed the Warrigal Track back to the sign we had seen at the start which put my fanciful dingo commentary to rest - they were not hunting us in the night. Winter, it turns out is also the mating season for dingoes, a time they are most active, noisiest, howling, pacing up and down the valleys looking for the warmth of the mate, not looking for us, just looking through the same mysterious landscape.