On Walkabout In: The Ancient Empire

A Walk Through the Ancient Empire

Adjacent to the Tree Top Walk in Western Australia’s Walpole-Nornalup National Park is the fabulous walk through an impressive grove of karri trees known as the Ancient Empire. This walk is on boardwalks through another grove a giant karri and red tingle trees. If you have come this far to do the Tree Top Walk you must do the Ancient Empire walk as well. This walk allows you to explore the bottom of the forest compared to the top of the trees like you do in the Tree Top Walk.

The trees in the Ancient Empire grow up to a height of 60 meters. This picture kind of gives you an idea how large these trees are compared to me:

They may not be as big as America’s red wood trees but they are still quite impressive. However they are not the biggest trees I have seen in Australia though because the mountain ash trees I saw at Mait’s Rest in the Otway Ranges I think are bigger.

A number of the trees are hollow at the bottom due to past bush fires. This provides for some good picture opportunities:

These burned out bottoms are extremely important for bio-diversity in the forest because many animals and birds use these burned out sections of the karri trees as their homes:

Fire is extremely important to the various species of gum trees such as the karri trees because they allow the trees to reproduce along with the side benefit of creating the hollows in the trees as shelter for the forest’s various animals:

Some of the hollows in these trees are so large that people can walk right through them:

A few of the trees have fallen over due to old age which provides a different perspective of how big these trees are:

As you can imagine the under growth is very thick in the Ancient Empire, but it is filled with plenty of colorful flowers:

The walk through the Ancient Empire takes about an hour, but there is plenty of park benches for you to sit on if you want to hang out for a while. When my wife and I were there, the park wasn’t too crowded and it ended up being a very pleasant day.

Really no trip to the southwest of Australia would be complete without taking both walk through the Valley of the Giants and the Ancient Empire to admire these incredibly impressive trees.

Prior Posting: The Valley of the Giants

Next Posting: Exploring the Logging Past of Pemberton

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