Where is the Stirling Range?

The best known entry to the Stirling Range is on Chester Pass Road:
430 km from Perth
90 km from Albany

The range is also accessible from Cranbrook on the Great Southern Highway.

For Fast Facts on the Stirling Ranges, click here.

What is the Stirling Range like?

National heritage listed Stirling Range National Park is 64km long from east to west and 18km wide north to south. It covers an area of 1,100 square kilometres or 116,000 hectares and rises spectacularly out of the surrounding plains to a height of 1095 m above sea level.

The Range offers some of the best mountain walking in Western Australia. Bluff Knoll (1095m) is the highest peak. Other favourites are Toolbrunup Peak (1052m), Ellen Peak (1012m), Mt Trio (.856m), Mt Magog (856m), Mt Hassell (847m), and Talyuberlup Peak (783m).

There are over 1,500 different flowers and plants including 125 orchid species and 9 endemic mountain bells. Spring commences in late August with the flowering of the Queen of Sheba Orchid and lasts through to December, when many flowers bloom on the mountain tops. There is always a variety of banksia heath or eucalypt trees flowering at some time of the year.

Over 160 different bird species have been sighted, including rare and endangered species. The beautiful, ever changing scenery provides wonderful bushwalking, photographic and painting opportunities. Birding is great all year round.

Services in the National Park are limited. See our Stirling Range Fast Facts for details.

A little bit of history

The plains in the Stirling Range region were the hunting grounds for small groups of Indigenous Australians for thousands of years before European settlement. At least two tribes frequented the area: the Qaaniyan people in the west, and the Koreng people in the east. The Stirling Range played an important role in their culture, appearing in a number of Dreamtime stories.

Captain Matthew Flinders recorded the first sighting of the inland mountain range on 5 January 1802, and named it ‘Mount Rugged’. The Stirling Range was named by John Septimus Roe on 4 November 1835 after Captain James Stirling, the first Governor of Western Australia.
Early exploitation of the Stirling Range included cutting of sandalwood and kangaroo hunting. The Range was never formally taken up for grazing, probably because of the many poison bushes in the area. However, squatters ran sheep to the south of the Range in the 1850s, and in the 1860s a selection was taken up at the base of Mount Trio.

The area that is now the Stirling Range National Park was temporarily reserved in April 1908, and formally gazetted as Western Australia's third national park in June 1913.