Queensland National Parks has teamed up with Google to bring the outdoors inside! Virtual travellers—from anywhere in the world—can explore some of our most-loved national parks … from the comfort of their own homes.

Google Street View now features a range of imagery of 8 beautiful national parks, from the coast to the mountains, and includes World Heritage rainforest, historic forts and heritage sites and even limestone caves deep underground! So you can take a virtual walk through these parks, wearing your pyjamas instead of your active wear!

When clicking on the link for Noosa National Park, you can virtually walk along the coastal track and gaze from the lookouts. When visiting the St Helena Island National Park link, you can virtually walk from the jetty onto the island and around the prison stockade and other historical features.

The sites include walking tracks and boardwalks, cycling tails, 4WD roads and scenic lookouts in national parks around the state:

• Chillagoe-Mungana Caves National Park
• Curtain Fig National Park
• D’Aguilar National Park
• Daisy Hill Conservation Park
• Fort Lytton National Park
• Main Range National Park
• Noosa National Park
• St Helena Island National Park

The Google Street View virtual tours are so good that we hope many more visitors will be inspired to visit our parks and forests. And for those who can’t, it provides a spectacular virtual experience. This is one way we can help everyone to better appreciate our magnificent protected areas.

So how did we do it?

A couple of our Park Rangers took it in turns to wear the Google Street View Trekker backpack—think of a 22kg spherical ‘camera’ on a ‘stand’ strapped to your back—and hiked up mountains, through valleys, into forests and around heritage sites, capturing 360 degree vision as they went. (We wonder about the looks they received from other visitors…). They also captured footage from a vehicle driving along national park roads. Capturing imagery from underground caves was a little more labour-intensive—they used an SLR camera with a wide-angle lens, taking 4 photos at each ‘spot’ along the path through the cavernous space.

It was a team effort, with local Park Rangers providing logistic support and advice in each location.

Our Park Rangers reported that the hardest part of the project was choosing where to go; and the most rewarding part was seeing these incredible places firsthand.

In all they spent 6 weeks, travelled more than 1,000km around the state, capturing vision from about 40km of tracks in Queensland National Parks.

Check out all the links to Google Maps for the park locations captured here: https://parks.des.qld.gov.au/experiences/virtual-qld-np