Pinnacles Travel Tips
Small decisions that change the day, each in a sentence. None of them costs anything and most of them are about the hour you arrive rather than the money you spend. Pinnacles Desert tours from Perth have already made several of these choices for you.
| If this is you | Do this |
|---|---|
| You have one day and want the geology | A day departure - the Discovery Centre closes at 4:30 pm |
| You have one day and want the sky | An evening departure between April and September |
| You are travelling in December or January | Come for the sunset; full dark arrives at the hour you are expected to leave |
| You are driving with three or four people | Drive yourself - entry is A$17 a vehicle, not a head |
| Somebody in the party cannot walk far | Drive the loop and use the 300 m Class 1 path |
| You want the flowers | August to October, with September the middle of it |
| You are photographing | The last two hours of light, and get low |
Go early or go late — the light does the work
The shadows are the photograph
Low sun rakes across a flat plain and every pillar throws a shadow longer than itself; at midday they throw almost none and the field flattens out.
The first two hours and the last two
Sunrise ranges from 5:09 am in December to 7:13 am in June, and sunset from 5:26 pm to 7:27 pm, so “early” means something different by six months.
Midday is for the Discovery Centre
It is the one thing here that is better in the middle of the day, and it shuts at 4:30 pm.
What to wear on the sand
Closed shoes, always
The walk trail is soft sand with limestone edges, and sandals lose the argument.
A layer for the evening
One operator warns plainly that the desert gets cold after dark, and July overnight minimums average 9.5 °C.
A hat that stays on
The mean 3 pm wind at the nearest coastal station is 29.3 km/h in January.
What to carry
More water than you think
There is none in the park, and one operator asks each traveller for 1.5 litres.
A downloaded map
Phone coverage on this stretch of coast is patchy enough to matter.
Cash is not needed
Entry is paid at the station on the way in and there is nothing else to buy.
Photographing the pillars
Shoot into the low sun, not with it
Backlighting separates the pillars from the sand; front light merges them.
Get low
Kneeling puts the horizon below the pillar tops and restores the scale a standing photograph loses.
Include something for size
A person at fifty metres tells the viewer what up to 4 metres means.
Stop when you see it
The 4.5 km loop is one-way, so there is no going back for a frame.
Beating the coach schedule
The middle of the day is the busy part
Day tours out of Perth arrive between about eleven and two, which is also the flattest light.
Evening departures have the field to themselves
By the time the sun is low, most of the coaches are on the road home.
A morning self-drive is the quietest of all
Nothing scheduled arrives before mid-morning.
Combining the desert with the coast
A swim on the way in
Hangover Bay is eight kilometres from the pillars inside the same national park, and half an hour there costs you nothing else in the day.
Living reefs, twenty minutes off the route
Lake Thetis sits four kilometres outside Cervantes, with a 300-metre boardwalk to microbial reefs dated at about 3,370 years.
Lancelin is the halfway point
Which is why four departures put the sandboarding there rather than at the end.
Travelling with children
The drive is the hard part, not the desert
Two hours each way, and the pillars themselves hold attention easily.
Check the age minimums
One departure bars under-fours from its four-wheel-drive leg and another does not carry children under six at all.
The dunes usually win
Sandboarding is the part children talk about afterwards, on every listing that includes it.
If you only have one day out of Perth
Decide daylight or dark first
Everything else follows from it, because the Discovery Centre and the stars do not overlap.
Then decide who is driving
Entry is A$17 a vehicle, so a car of four is cheap; a seat buys you the drive back.
Then book the date, not the tour
Cloud is the one thing nobody controls, and the twenty-four-hour refund window on most of these departures is what it is for.
Pinnacles Tours lists every departure with its pickup point, its hours and what its fare covers. The safety page has the handful of things worth arranging before you go, the month-by-month page has the figures behind the timing advice above, and the trails page has the distances for each of the three routes through the field.