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 The brooding beauty of the mountain landscape, its stunning and unique wildflowers and the challenge of climbing Bluff Knoll have long drawn bushwalkers and climbers to the Stirling Range National Park. At 1,095 metres above sea level ( 4000 ft ), Bluff Knoll is the highest peak in the south-west of Western Australia. The main face of the bluff forms one of the most impressive cliffs in the Australian mainland. It takes three to four hours to complete the six-kilometre ( 3.6 mile ) return climb.
The jagged peaks of the Stirling Range stretch for 65 kilometres ( 40 miles ) ( from east to west. The rocks of the range were once sands and silts deposited in the delta of a river flowing into a shallow sea. Deposited over many millions of years, these layers of sediment became so thick and heavy that, in combination with unimaginable forces stretching the Earth's crust in the area, they caused the crust in the area to sink. As the surface subsided, still more sediment was deposited in the depression which was left. The final thickness of sediment is believed to be over 1.6 kilometres! As the sediment built up, so did the pressure on the layers below. The water was forced out of these layers, which solidified to become rocks known as sandstones and shales. Buried deep in the Earth's crust, the rocks which form today's Stirling Range were gradually exposed over millions of years as the surrounding rocks were worn away by the forces of weathering (chemical breakdown) and erosion (physical removal of material by water, wind and gravity). It was during this process that the current form of the range was sculpted. 
History The Qaaniyan and Koreng Aboriginal people originally lived around the range. In cold weather they wore kangaroo skin cloaks reaching nearly to the knee. They also established small, conical huts in wet weather. Sticks were placed in the ground and bent to form a cone, then threaded with paperbark, rushes or leafy branches. They told many stories about the Stirling Range and in many of them the range is hostile and dangerous. Bluff Knoll was called Pualaar Miial (great many faced hill) by the local Aboriginal people. This was because the rocks on the bluff were shaped like faces. The peak is often covered with mists that curl around the mountain tops and float into the gullies. These constantly changing mists were believed to be the only visible form of a spirit called Noatch (meaning dead body or corpse), who had an evil reputation.  The range was first recorded by Matthew Flinders in 1802. In 1831, Surgeon Alexander Collie recorded the Aboriginal name of the range, Koi Kyeunu-ruff, which was provided to him by his Aboriginal guide Mokare. Surveyor-General John Septimus Roe travelled to Perth with Governor Sir James Stirling in 1835 and glimpsed "some remarkable and elevated peaks". Roe called them the Stirling Range. The area was declared a national park in 1913, at a time when the dominant culture was bent towards clearing the bush and converting it to farmland.
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