Dr. Tas Walker
[Originally published as Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve has stunning view of Glass House Mountains]
At the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve near Maleny, Queensland, the spectacular Glass House Mountains draw your gaze like a magnet. Photographs do not do them justice. You could spend hours soaking in the view as the clouds and shadows continually change during the day. In this photo, the scene is hazy because the atmosphere has become smoky with the progress of the day.
These mountains are the remnant cores of volcanoes that erupted during Noah’s Flood, as the floodwaters were receding into the Pacific Ocean from the continent.
Mount Beerwah to the left is the largest of the plugs, rising 556 metres above sea level. The narrow plug near the centre is Mount Coonowrin, once called Crookneck. It reaches 377 metres. Behind these mountains, in the distance, you can see the misty horizontal surface of a plateau. It is about the same height as where we are standing. Geologists think the volcanoes erupted when the land surface was at about this level. They blasted their way up through hundreds of metres of sandstone. Some, such as the rounded plugs in the photo, look like they did not break the land surface.
After the volcanoes erupted, the sandstone was eroded away by the receding floodwater. Imagine the ocean level a kilometre or more above the level of the plateau. Then picture the water tumbling as in a waterfall tens of kilometres wide as the water flowed off the land. It eroded the edge of the escarpment backwards forming a fractal shape, like the edge of a lace tablecloth. It was this water, as it was receding in sheets, that had previously eroded the flat plateaus on the landscape.
One of the best places to observe these mountains is from the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve, which has a spacious parking area, facilities for picnics and bar-b-ques, and a cafe where you can buy meals and refreshments. It comprises 55 hectares of subtropical rainforest—a remnant of the rainforests that once covered the Blackall Range, which forms the plateaus in the area. As well as the view of the Glass House Mountains, you can enjoy walks through the rainforest. This has been described as walking through a living museum of diverse plant and animal life.
You can also visit a display called Rainforest Through Time. This is staffed by volunteers, and you will need a ‘gold’ coin ‘donation’ for entry. Although this display presents the standard long-age evolutionary interpretation, the geological evidence is actually an amazing confirmation of Noah’s Flood.
Note that the order they present in the display is correct, but the idea that it happened over millions of years is wrong. It happened rapidly about 4,500 years ago during Noah’s Flood. The dinosaurs they have on display were buried as the waters of Noah’s Flood were rising, and the sediments covered a large part of Eastern Australia.
After the floodwaters peaked they eventually began to recede from the continent, eroding the land. It was at this time that the volcanoes erupted. In the parts of the display that present later events, they are actually describing what happened in Australia after the Flood. It was over these millennia that the continent dried out, a time that scientist writers, such as Mary White, have described as the browning of Australia.
So, if you ever have the opportunity, visit the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve for a relaxing, enjoyable day. Grab a brochure about the Glass House Mountains showing their true history and their connection with the most catastrophic event that engulfed this world—the event that affected the ancestors of every human alive on the planet.
