The Bungle Bungle Range is a maze of hundreds of orange-and-black, beehive-shaped sandstone domes so remote that the outside world only learned of them in the 1980s, when a documentary crew flew over and put the striped range on Australian television. The dark bands are alive — a thin crust of cyanobacteria and lichen that seals the porous rock and holds the fragile cones together, while the orange bands are bare rock stained by iron oxide, drying too fast for the crust to take hold. Water and wind cut the domes from a single Devonian sandstone plateau over roughly twenty million years, and the crust is so delicate that a single touch can scar it. The local Gija and Jaru people have lived in this country for more than 40,000 years — Purnululu is their word for the sandstone — and today they co-manage the national park, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003 for its cone-karst towers, the finest found in sandstone anywhere on Earth.
Inside the range, narrow gorges open a different world entirely. Cathedral Gorge widens into a vast natural amphitheatre where a still, sand-fringed pool sits beneath a curved rock ceiling tall enough to swallow sound, while Echidna Chasm pinches to barely a shoulder's width, its conglomerate walls glowing furnace-orange when the midday sun drops straight down the crack. Because the park lies at the end of a rough unsealed track and closes completely through the Kimberley's wet season, from about December to March, the domes remain one of the least crowded World Heritage sites on the continent — vast enough that a whole afternoon of walking barely touches their edge.