Lake Hillier

LakesWestern Australia,Australia

Fragile nature — stay on the trail, leave no trace.

A pink lake off Western Australia that keeps its colour in a jar, because the pink is microbes in the brine that rain dilutes away.

September·Edge of season

May–Oct

Autumn and winter rains dilute the brine, so the pink softens and can fade toward grey-blue.

Year-round The salt pan and its white crust sit on an uninhabited island all year, reached only by flight or cruise from Esperance. The pink is not guaranteed: it is deep in dry summers and grey-blue in wet years.

Lake Hillier, on Middle Island off the south coast of Western Australia near Esperance, is pink because of the only things that manage to live in it. The colour is in the water and not in the sky: a jar of it stays pink on your windowsill. The lake is many times saltier than the sea, and almost nothing can live in it. Salt-loving algae and archaea flood their cells with red and orange pigments, and those pigments are sunscreen — a shield against light that would otherwise finish them in brine this bright. The shade has a dial, and the dial is salt. Months of evaporation concentrate the brine and deepen the pink; a wet winter thins it back towards grey-blue. Almost everyone meets it from a light aircraft. The planes run east from Esperance over the archipelago, and the hour you fly decides what you get: with the sun overhead the colour reads at its deepest and the seam against the navy ocean is sharpest. The island arrives in a single pass, low enough for you to pick out the salt crust at its edge. Behind it stands Flinders Peak, which Matthew Flinders climbed in 1802 to write down the coloured water below. He never had the view from overhead that now defines the place. There is one way to stand beside it. A licensed boat runs east from Esperance, tenders passengers onto Middle Island's beach and walks them up to the shore, and it sails only when the lake is worth the crossing. The same walk passes the ruins the island's early settlers left, and the camp of Black Jack Anderson, an American sealer turned pirate and the only one Australia is known to have had. Esperance has a second Pink Lake, on the mainland and far easier to reach. It stopped being pink in the mid-2000s, after a highway and a rail line cut the channels that had flushed salt through it. The water freshened, the microbes stopped making their pigment, and the town has been trying to take the name back ever since.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check what colour the lake is actually running before you go — it is well short of the old electric pink, and recent passenger photos from the flight operators are the only honest guide.
No road, no airstrip, no way to get yourself there — Middle Island is reached only by scenic flight or cruise from Esperance, and the boat landings are paused while the lake is off-colour.
Skip the polarising filter behind the aircraft window — polarised glass fights the perspex and can blotch the shot; ask for a seat on the lake side of the cabin instead.
From June to October the same flight crosses whale water — southern right and humpback whales move through the archipelago below, so scan the sea as well as the lake.

Things to do

1
Time the flight for midday, when the pink runs deepest
Light aircraft out of Esperance run east over the archipelago, and the hour you fly decides what you get. With the sun overhead the colour reads at its deepest and the seam against the navy ocean is sharpest. Middle Island then arrives in a single pass, low enough to pick out the salt crust at the lake's edge. Behind it stands Flinders Peak, the hill Matthew Flinders climbed in 1802 to log the coloured water below, though he never got the overhead view that now defines the place.
2
Cross to Middle Island and stand at the lake itself
A licensed boat runs east from Esperance, tenders passengers onto Middle Island's beach and walks them up to the lake — the only way to meet the colour at ground level rather than from the air. The same walk passes the ruins the island's early settlers left and the campsite of Black Jack Anderson. It sails only when the lake is worth the crossing, and it is on hold while the water runs brown.