Mount Hypipamee National Park

Introduction

This small, but very beautiful, high-altitude rainforest national park boasts a number of ‘must-see’ features. The first is an ancient sheer-sided crater known as a volcanic pipe or diatreme, formed when a volcanic vent exploded violently some 10 000 to 15 000 years ago. The crater, 70 metres across, has vertical granite walls that drop 58 metres from the rainforest-fringed rim to a greenish coloured lake, 82 metres deep. The surrounding rainforest is studded with enormous blocks of granite. A second feature is Dinner Falls, a series of cascades plunging out of the rainforest onto a boulder-strewn creek below. The park’s high-altitude rainforest is also striking, and very different from the tropical rainforests found elsewhere on the Atherton Tableland. The park supports more than 200 bird species, including the golden bowerbird (this smallest bowerbird makes the largest nest of any Australian bowerbird), the spotted catbird and Victoria’s rifl ebird, and so many species of possums that the park has become renowned for them. Go spotlighting with a torch at night to see green, lemuroid or Herbert River ringtails or coppery brushtail possums (a subspecies of the common brushtail).Day-use facilities include picnic tables, wood barbecues, water and toilets. A sealed 800-metre-return walking track (wheelchair accessible), leading to a viewing platform above the crater, has a display board at the trailhead giving information on the crater and its surrounds. A longer 1-kilometre trail leads to Dinner Falls, at the headwaters of the Barron River, before looping back to the carpark. Commercial tours arrange evening nature walks to observe the park’s wildlife by torchlight.

Fact file

Camping

No camping

Location and access

1358 of north-west of Brisbane; 25 km south of Atherton via Kennedy Hwy

Park Information

• NQIS (07) 3227 8185
• QPWS Yungaburra (07) 4095 3768

Size

364 ha

Where to Stay

Atherton (07) 4091 4222

This content is from the publication:

Explore Australia’s National Parks

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