Pinnacles Desert Sunset Dinner and Stargazing Tour
Park fees includedDinner includedTelescope provided
From $160 per person
How to Visit the Pinnacles: Tickets, Hours, Tours and Everything You Need to Know
Short answer. You need two things: A$17 of park entry, charged per vehicle rather than per person, and a way of covering the 200 km from Perth. Then make one decision. Come in daylight and the Discovery Centre is open; come for the evening and the light is doing the work but the centre shut at 4:30 pm. You cannot have both on the same trip.
What it costs before you book anything
Park entry is the one unavoidable cost and it is smaller than people expect. A standard vehicle carrying up to 12 occupants pays A$17. That is per vehicle, not per head, so four of you pay it once between you. Concession vehicles pay A$10, and a coach over twelve occupants is charged per person instead.
You pay at the entry station on the way in. There is nothing to book online, no timed entry and no separate ticket for the visitor centre. Most guided departures fold the fee into their fare, and each card here says whether yours does. Visiting the Pinnacles has the whole fee table.
Opening hours, and the rule that decides your day
Two different things are open here on two different schedules, and the gap between them is what you are really choosing between.
- The Discovery Centre: 9:30 am – 4:30 pm, every day except Christmas Day.
- The desert itself: visitable outside those hours, with visitors expected to have left the park by 9 pm.
So if the geology is why you are coming, get there before 4:30 pm. If the sky is why you are coming, you will arrive after the centre has shut and that is fine. What does not work is assuming you will get both.
When the sky actually goes dark
This is the fact almost nobody checks and it changes an evening trip completely. Sunset here moves nearly two hours across the year, and full astronomical dark moves with it.
Local time at the Pinnacles, on the 15th of each month.
| Month | Sunset | Sky fully dark |
|---|---|---|
| January | 7:27 pm | 9:00 pm |
| April | 6:01 pm | 7:20 pm |
| June | 5:26 pm | 6:51 pm |
| August | 5:55 pm | 7:15 pm |
| October | 6:30 pm | 7:52 pm |
| December | 7:19 pm | 8:55 pm |
Read the June row against the January one. In June you get two hours of true dark inside the park before the 9 pm deadline. In January the sky is not dark until nine o’clock, which is the hour you are expected to be leaving. Book the sky between April and September; book January and February for the sunset instead.
Getting there: the coast road or the highway
The Pinnacles are 200 km north of Perth, about two hours each way on sealed road. Head north on Wanneroo Road, which becomes Indian Ocean Drive, and turn right at the Pinnacles sign a couple of kilometres south of Cervantes. The Discovery Centre is 17 km further on.
The inland alternative is Brand Highway to Cervantes and then two kilometres south. Most people take one road up and the other back. There is no bus, no train and no airport, so it is a hire car or a departure — getting there covers both and lists the five places tours leave from.
Fill up in Cervantes, not in the park. There is no fuel, no drinking water and no food inside the desert area. Cervantes has all three and is the last of them. The safety page has the short list of things worth sorting before the turn-off.
How long you actually need
- One to two hours in the desert — enough for the 4.5 km loop and the 1.5 km walk with stops. Every guided departure allows this.
- Eight to eleven hours for the day — because four of them are road. That is not a criticism of the tours; it is the distance.
- An overnight in Cervantes — the only way to get first light and full dark on the same trip without driving 400 kilometres twice.
Which departure to book
Start with the hour, not the price. Evening departures leave Perth in the early afternoon, put you among the pillars as the light goes, serve dinner in the desert and carry a telescope on three of them. Day departures leave in the morning, reach the desert while the centre is open, and fill the rest of the day with the Lancelin dunes, a wildlife park or a lobster lunch.
Fares run from $127 to $1458 a head, and most of that spread is how long you are away rather than what you see. Pinnacles day tours from Perth set out what each fare covers and where it collects you from.
What to bring
There is no shade anywhere in the field, so a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen are not optional in any month. One operator asks each traveller for a 1.5-litre water bottle, which is a sensible figure whether or not you are on that tour. Closed shoes: the trail is soft sand with limestone edges.
For an evening departure, take a layer. One operator warns plainly that it gets cold in the desert after dark, and July overnight minimums average 9.5 °C on the coast before you allow for wind.
The rules that catch people out
Three of them, and all three are signposted. You must never climb the pillars — the park authority asks visitors not to, and its own management plan records that some of the smaller formations have disappeared completely under foot traffic. You cannot bring a dog, anywhere in the park. And you are expected out by 9 pm, which is the one that quietly caps an evening visit.
None of this is difficult to comply with, and a guided departure handles all three without you thinking about it. Every tour on Pinnacles Tours is built around the same rules.
What a good first visit looks like
Leave Perth in the early afternoon, break the drive at the coast, and reach the field with an hour of sun left. Walk the trail while the shadows are long, then eat in the desert while the sky changes colour, then look through a telescope for an hour. Get home around midnight, having spent about ten hours on it.
If you would rather see the geology properly, invert it: leave in the morning, do the Discovery Centre first because it closes at 4:30 pm, then the loop, then the walk, then the dunes on the way home. Both are good days. They are just not the same day.
The one thing most first visits get wrong
Arriving in the middle of the day in summer. The light is flat, there is no shade, and a reviewer on a January day tour describes the heat cutting their time among the pillars down to quick photographs. That is what happens when a coach reaches the field at one in the afternoon in midsummer.
The month-by-month page has the temperature for every month alongside the hour the sky goes dark, which between them decide when you should be standing in the field.
Decide daylight or dark first. Everything else on the day follows from it.Most departures refund in full; each card states its own window.
See the departuresDepartures that fit a first visit
Pinnacles Desert, Koalas and Sandboarding 4WD Day Tour from Perth
Lunch includedSandboards providedHotel pickup
From $196 per person
