Black Mountain National Park

Black Mountain National Park is a 781 hectare protected area in Shire of Cook, Queensland, Australia.GeographyThe park is 25 km south west of Cooktown. It is managed and protected as a national park under the Nature Conservation Act 1992.The main feature of the park is the mass of granite boulders, some the size of houses. The absence of soil between the boulders and rocks create a maze of gaps and passages, which can be used to penetrate inside the mountain. These rocks can become extremely hot.The area has a bad reputation as numerous people and those searching for the missing have disappeared without trace giving Black Mountain the nickname ‘mountain of death’. The Mulligan Highway marks the western border of the park.Natural historyThe national park's distinctive hard granite boulders and range originally formed out of magma that first slowly solidified under the Earth's crust about 250 million years ago.The softer land surfaces above the solidified magma eroded away over time, leaving the magma's fractured top to be exposed as a mountain of grey granite boulders blackened by a film of microscopic blue-green algae growing on the exposed surfaces. Colder rains falling on the dark, heated granite boulders causes the boulders to progressively fracture, break, and slowly disintegrate, sometimes explosively.Cultural historyThe National Park's "Black Mountains" are a heavily significant feature of the Kuku Nyungkal people's cultural landscape known locally to Aboriginal Australians as Kalkajaka (trans: "place of spear").