Pink Salt Lake Country

A must do when visiting Yorke Peninsula in South Australia is to drive the self-guided salt lake trail.

Starting from the town of Yorketown, the landscape in the area is dotted with salt lakes that given the right conditions, can be a bubble gum pink, making them a standout in the surrounding golden brown farm land.

You can drive a short distance on a looping trail of around 9 kilometres to get a quick look or, take the full tour of around 48 kilometres that also loops around the countryside, for a complete look at all the lakes, as well as historical sites, lookouts and picnic spots.

For the longer tour you should allow up to an hour and a half, especially if like me you are continually stopping to look, photograph and enjoy the surroundings.

The trail is really well signposted and you can also pick up a tour map from information centres to ensure you don’t miss a thing. Many of the roads are unsealed but they are really well graded and a conventional car can easily handle them.

Seeing and capturing these and other salt lakes when they’re at their prettiest pink hue can be difficult. The perfect conditions are just after there has been a little rain, followed by a bright sunny day, and we were lucky enough to get just those type of conditions.

The salt lakes are such a feature of the area that even a water tower in Yorketown has had the street art treatment by artist Jasmine Crisp, and features amongst other local scenes, a pink lake.

There are some ruins and memorials along the drive that get you out of the car to see, including the ruins of the old Sunbury School and a memorial to Lake Fowler School 1896 – 1912.

Lake Fowler is the largest of the salt lakes, it was once known as 12 mile lake, unsurprisingly because it has a circumference of around 12 miles. It was first scraped for salt in 1874 and then in 1898, 25 block were allotted for private harvesting which took place by hand. By the 1950s most of the blocks were owned by the Australian Salt Company and mechanical scrapers were being used to make harvesting quicker.

Today Lake Fowler is a source of gypsum which is used by Adelaide Brighton Cement company to make cement.

Along the trail you’ll also find this brightly painted water tank which depicts salt lake workers, emus and other scenes from the area. The artist, from Studio Surf, was also responsible for some of the murals in Warooka.