Kata Tjuta

About 50 kilometers west of Uluru there is another rock - or rather group of rocks - sticking up from the plain.

This is Kata-Tjuta, and the rocks were formed at the same time as Uluru. Unlike Uluru, however, the rock strata weren't tilted on edge, but remained more or less horizontal, and a grid of vertrical joints in the rock gradually eroded downwards to leave a series of 36 dome shaped rocks of varying height. The summit of the tallest dome is about 500 meters (1500 feet) above the base, so is about half as high again as Uluru.


View Larger Map

The European name for Kata-Tjuta is the Olgas, and close to, the domes do seem like a group of old women leaning towards each other in conversation. I was disappointed to have this mental image clouded when I discovered that they were not originally named as a group of women, but that the highest dome is called Mount Olga after Queen Olga of Württenberg, a nineteenth century Russian Grand Duchess, who was interested in geology, and some of whose mineral collection can be seen in the museum in Stuttgart.



There is a rather fine walk - called the Valley of the Winds - that takes you through the clefts between some of the large domes, and into the central plain. Because of the way that the domes have formed, the clefts between adjacent domes have 'cols' at the points that adjacent domes are closest. The route takes you first over a low col, and the path looks as though it's been made by cementing large boulders together. It has indeed, but this is the rock - a 'conglomerate' - that Kata-Tjuta is made of, the boulders are from an alluvial fan, and the cement is the sandstone matrix. The smooth path surface was simply made by clearing the loose rubble to each side into a 'kerb':

From the top of the first col there's a view into the wide valley below:

The path descends, and turns right in the valley to head up between the giants:

As the valley narrows, the walls tower up on either side, sculpted in places by temporary cascades during rain:

The path continues upwards towards the second and higher col, with the cleft narrowing on either side. It had been grey for most of the day, and I expected that the view at the top would be much the same as the rocks that I was among.

Instead, the view was breathtaking: the ground dropped away steeply, so that the sandstone walls rose up almost vertically on either side for hundreds of feet. In the distance, on the other side of a wide green valley, was a row of lower domes. And somehow the sun managed to creep in between the clouds to light the scene:

The path descended into the wooded cleft, and then curled left around the foot of the dome to give a fine view out over the plain before loopong back over the first col.

I started the walk later in the day than I'd intended, and was worried whether there would be enough time to complete it before it got dark. As I climbed the first col, I stopped a young couple coming down to ask them what the walk was like and how long it had taken them. The girl looked shattered and just said "it's very hard". I nearly cut the walk short and turned back at the first col. If I had, I would have missed the strange world between the ancient domes - and that unforgettable view.