Lark Quarry Conservation Park is Jump Up country – a landscape of mesas, gullies and steep escarpments.

This dry and dramatic landscape has been created by water. Scientists call this landscape “dissected residuals”, because the sediments laid down by ancient lakes and seas have been carved over the millennia by runoff from countless summer storms.

The soils are easily eroded. The weathered and hardened cap rocks give the mesas their distinctive flat tops.

The dominant vegetation is spinifex grass, with lancewood and Normanton box. Many small herbs flourish after summer rains.

From the lookout on the mesa behind the Trackways building, you can see Mitchell grass plains rolling away to the west and Coolibah trees growing along the watercourses. These are natural grass plains - they have not been cleared.

Further to the west is the Diamantina River and the channel country - a vast, flat plain crisscrossed by braided watercourses, many of which join during floods.