Boranup Karri Forest Day Loop With a Yallingup Finish

You do not need to drive to Pemberton to stand under karri trees. There's a stand of them an hour south of my workshop, halfway between Margaret River town and Augusta, and most visitors miss it. The forest is called Boranup. Once you've stood inside it you don't forget the scale.

I'll drive down a few times a year. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Pamela, sometimes with a visitor who's said they like trees. The road in cuts through the tallest stand and the light through the canopy is a thing I've never been able to describe properly. So I make this drive into a loop, and the loop ends back in Yallingup with a cold drink.

Karri is Eucalyptus diversicolor. It grows in a very small pocket of the South West, basically the wet corridor between Margaret River and Walpole. The Boranup stand isn't the tallest karri country in the state. The properly enormous trees are further south at Pemberton and the Valley of the Giants. But Boranup is the easiest to reach from Yallingup or Margaret River town, and the trees here still reach sixty metres and more.

What's striking about karri isn't just the height. It's the colour of the trunks. The bark sheds every year and the new bark underneath is pale: almost white in spring, fading to a soft orange-grey through summer. A grove of mature karri looks like a cathedral made of pillars. That's not an overstatement.

I don't use karri much in my own furniture. It's a beautiful timber but it moves more than jarrah, it's softer, and the colour fades faster. So my interest in the tree is mostly as a living thing, not as a board. Even after a lifetime here working with eucalypts I find Boranup humbling. The scale tells you something about what timber really is before we get to it how jarrah and marri actually differ.

From Yallingup, head south on Caves Rd. The road runs roughly parallel to the coast, through the wine country, through Margaret River town. Twenty minutes south of town you'll pass Hamelin Bay turnoff. Keep going. Caves Rd narrows. The bush gets denser. You'll feel the temperature drop a degree or two as the canopy thickens.

The Boranup Karri Forest signs appear about forty-five minutes south of Yallingup. The first lookout is on the eastern side of the road: a small parking bay and a viewing platform. Stop here first. You're looking into the canopy from above, more or less, because the road has climbed onto a ridge. The platform is the only place you see the forest as a forest. From the ground you only see what's around you, which is the next thing.

Photo: Lasthib, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

There are two short walks I'd recommend. Both are well-marked, both are flat, both are under an hour.

The first is the Boranup Forest walk from the campground. Park at the day use area, follow the loop track through the understorey. About forty minutes round trip. You'll be inside the grove the whole way. Look up often. The peppermint understorey at knee height is dense and slightly sweet-smelling in the heat.

The second is a section of the Cape to Cape Track that runs through the southern edge of the forest. Pick it up at the Boranup Beach access road. Walk north along the track for thirty minutes, then turn around. The Cape to Cape doesn't normally come to mind as a forest walk (most of it is coast), but this section is the exception, and it's lovely day walks off the Cape to Cape.

A grove of mature karri looks like a cathedral made of pillars. That's not an overstatement.

This far south, drive the last three kilometres to Boranup Beach. The road is unsealed but firm. A normal sedan handles it in dry weather. The beach itself runs for miles in either direction with almost nobody on it. The sand is white. The water is properly cold compared to Geographe Bay up north. This stretch of coast faces the Southern Ocean and the swell shows it.

I wouldn't swim here unless I knew the conditions. The rips can be serious. But I'd happily walk the sand for an hour and come back. The contrast of going from inside the karri grove straight to that open beach is one of the better hour-long transitions in the South West.

Photo: Lasthib, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The loop home is the same Caves Rd in reverse, but slower. There are places to stop you bypassed on the way down.

Hamelin Bay if you missed it. Stingrays come into the shallows there year-round, big ones, two metres across. Don't touch them but don't avoid them either. They're used to people.

Then back into the wine country. I'd skip the cellar doors on this loop. The day's been about timber and water, not tasting flights. For a glass with food, Vasse Felix's restaurant is on Caves Rd and they take walk-ins most weeks driving Caves Road properly.

The light in the wine country late afternoon is the same light that brings me back from any drive south. The paddocks turn gold, the vines throw long shadows, the road empties out as the day-trippers head back to Perth.

Back in Yallingup by 5pm with the timing right. Stop at Caves House for a beer on the verandah, or at Yallingup Steiner café for a coffee instead. The coast lookout above Yallingup Beach is two minutes off the main road. Pull in there before you head home and watch the surf coming in for ten minutes. Forty years on, I still do this.

Photo: David Stanley, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

I make this loop because the karri trees do something to me that nothing else in this region does. The coast I see every day. The vines I see every week. The karri are different. They're so far from the scale of what I work with in the workshop that they reset my eye. I come back to a jarrah board on the bench and I see it fresh.

For visitors staying in Yallingup or Dunsborough, this is the drive that puts the rest of the region in context. You see why people talk about the South West as forest country, not just coast country. You see what timber means in a place where trees grow this tall.

The gallery is the first meaningful stop on the drive back north. After an hour in the karri, come and see what this region does with its trees. The workshop is on Blythe Rd, Yallingup. Google Maps sometimes misdirects via Wildwood Rd — stay on Bussell Hwy, turn at the Carbunup store, then Blythe Rd. Pamela runs the gallery. I'll be at the bench.

The trees were here a long time before me and they'll be here long after. That's part of why I go. The other part is that I like driving Caves Rd. That's enough.