Cape Le Grand National Park, WA

Cape Le Grand National Park is about 45 minutes drive from Esperance and we headed there with the aim of doing one walk in the morning and one walk in the afternoon.

The first trail that we went on was the trail up to the top of Frenchman Peak – which is only a 3km return walk, but is classed as ‘Grade 5’ – ‘Extreme trail with very rough surface, and may have very steep hills, arduous rock hopping or rock scrambling.‘

The walk didn’t turn out to be too extreme, and the rating was because the second part of the walk is pretty much just walking up a very steep rock face – it would be a bit dicey if it was wet.

The trail was pretty busy and full of people who seemed surprised by how steep it actually was. By the time that we came back down we were glad we had done this walk first, as there was a veritable procession of people starting their ascent of the rock at around 10.15am.

Our second walk was a return trip from Lucky Bay to somewhere near Boulder Hill, which was part of a longer 20km coastal track. The section that we did was 5.5km each way – so 11km total distance and it took us about 5.5 hours including a stop for lunch. Some of the trail was pretty hard going over steep rocks, but the views were great.