Very easily reached via sealed roads, but astonishing little-visited, Anvil Beach is deliciously wild.
It offers visual splendour, grave danger, and safety.
If you intend to swim there, you must very carefully select exactly where/when/if to do so, how to reach your chosen point of entry, and how/if you can safely return from it…most especially if the tide is soon to turn, or a weather change is imminent.
Anvil Beach is a whisker more than 30 minutes’ drive from Denmark, and circa 40 minutes from Albany.
Either way, the turnoff is adjacent to Youngs Siding, on the lower, “via Elleker” road, near to where that road meets the South Coast Highway.
Click here for more photos/videos, info about Anvil Beach and other nearby places, and a map.
My beloved and I have visited Anvil Beach a number of times, and look forward to doing so again, soon.
Most times to date, I have either not taken a camera, or the light was “wrong”
This post’s two photos – taken within two minutes of each other – show just a small portion of a diverse whole.
The drive out along the Nullaki Peninsula is both inspiring and dispiriting.
If ever there were a place that obviously should have long ago become a National Park or Nature Reserve…
Instead, much of it is private property, and much of that property is the preserve of the mega-rich.
However, the relatively “good” news is that covenants are in place to preserve most of the “eco friendly” Nullaki Estate subdivision in its “natural state”.
Houses may be luxe-plus, but their “footprints” are limited to a small portion of the land, and the only clearings allowed are little buffers to facilitate home-owners’ defence against fire.
Nullaki Estate property owners are not allowed to build fences, nor graze livestock.
The “great unwashed”/ general public has free access (via an automated gate, a little after you pass by the Berry farm) to some lovely bush, to the waterside picnic spots, shores and waters of Wilson Inlet…and to Anvil Beach.
Wilson Inlet is one of umpteen beautiful, substantial estuaries/inlets along Western Australia’s south coast.
Anvil Beach car park is literally the end of the Nullaki road.
Wear covered footwear – the sandy/cliffy path down to the beach is decidedly “snakey”.
As you prepare to walk down from the car park, you see – directly below you, and to your right – a sandy beach that faces straight into the Southern Ocean.
On the “right” days its waves can be – as I once overheard a gobsmacked surfer dude/first-time visitor exclaim – “world class”.
So are the rips!
Most people should not enter the water there, ever.
However, if you look left, you can see a reef, which looks like it surely must keep going, to the left/east, on the other side of the tumbling, rocky point.
It does!
If sea is calm and tide is out, you can safely wade your way around the point.
Otherwise, you can scramble up and down on dry land, just above/behind the point.
On that other side you can bathe safely and enjoy the champagne-like effervescence of water that has just bubbled through – sometimes, also over – the honeycombed sandstone reef that protects you from the wild water on the reef’s ocean-facing side.
Take sunblock – shade may be nonexistent.
Flies may be abundant…or blessedly absent.