Torndirrup National Park is located 10 kilometres south of Albany on the shores of the King George Strait. The park is famous for its rock formations carved by the wind and harsh waves of the Southern Ocean: the Window, Bridge, Shell and others, all carved out of granite over thousands of years.
Torndirrup National Park was established in 1918, one of the first in Western Australia. It was named after a tribe of Australian Aboriginal people who lived in the area. Today, this park is one of the most visited in the state - the number of visitors reaches 250 thousand per year.
The territory of the park consists of three types of rocks, one of which - gneiss - was formed 1300-1600 million years ago! This rock can be seen on the Window cliffs. Granitic rocks formed later when the Australian plate separated from the Antarctic plate about 1160 million years ago. They can be seen at the top of Stone Hill.
The flora of Thorndirrap National Park includes cotton bush, mint trees, swamp eucalyptus, various species of banksia and curry forest. It is also home to the very rare Albany cotton bush and the world's only population of blue lily.
Animals in the park include kangaroos, bush rats, pygmy cuscus and short-nosed bandicoots. Reptiles abound, including the tiger snake, echiopsis, spotted ringed python and brown snake. A very rare species of shrew was discovered here in 1976. The birds of the park are equally diverse - honeycreepers, New Zealand starlings, threepercatchers and many sea birds. Whales and harbour seals can often be seen swimming past from the cliffs.
There are many hiking trails across the park that are no more than 1.5 kilometres long. Only one trail is 10 kilometres long and it leads along the Flinders Peninsula to the eastern end of the park. When walking along the coastal part of the park, you should be extremely careful not to stray from the equipped trails - there have already been several accidents, when tourists who deviated from the route were washed away directly into the raging ocean waters by an unexpected wave.
