Conondale is rugged in the old-fashioned sense, country that fights you. The terrain folds into gorges and valleys, with peaks climbing past 700 metres to Mount Langley at 868 metres, the highest point in the range and on the whole Sunshine Coast. Boulder-strewn creeks tumble between them, and waterfalls like Booloumba Creek Falls cut through the rock. The range is a watershed, splitting the rain it catches between the Brisbane River to the south and the Mary River to the north. Most of the year it is soaked: roughly 1,500 millimetres of rain falls here, much of it in summer downpours, and that water grows everything from subtropical rainforest in the high gullies to dry eucalypt forest on the exposed slopes. Along the creek flats, towering flooded gums rise straight out of the rainforest canopy.

Long before it was a park, this was a meeting place and a larder. The Conondale region was important country for both the Jinibara and the Kabi Kabi peoples, a pathway through the ranges and a place to gather food, above all the bunya pine, whose great cones drew gatherings from across the wider region and whose trees still stand in the park today. That deep significance has not faded; the bunya remains culturally important to Aboriginal people now. When loggers came for the red cedar, blackbutt, and tallowood in the 1800s, they were cutting into a landscape that had been known, named, and cared for over countless generations, long before anyone thought to draw a boundary around it and call it protected.

What survives here survives because here is one of the few places left. The park is the critical refuge for the Richmond birdwing butterfly, Australia's largest subtropical butterfly, and for the vine its caterpillars must eat, the only plant on which the female will lay her eggs. Two more barred frogs cling on in the streams, the endangered giant barred frog, at the very northern edge of its range, and the endangered Fleay's barred frog. The black-breasted button-quail scratches through the dry rainforest after losing most of its habitat elsewhere, and the long-nosed potoroo, the smallest member of the kangaroo family, hides in the undergrowth. Of nearly 800 plant species and almost 180 birds recorded here, dozens are threatened. The shadow over them all is the chytrid fungus, the same silent killer linked to the gastric-brooding frog's disappearance, now detected in the region.

For visitors, Conondale ranges from a gentle stroll to a serious expedition. The Conondale Range Great Walk runs 56 kilometres in a four-day circuit, climbing through rainforest and wet sclerophyll along old logging roads to the high country, then skirting the very headwaters of Booloumba and Bundaroo creeks. Two surprises wait along the way. At Mount Allan, walkers can climb a 9.6-metre fire tower for a 360-degree sweep of the Mary Valley. And deep in the forest stands the Strangler Cairn, a 3.7-metre sculpture of hand-cut granite by the internationally renowned artist Andy Goldsworthy, with a living strangler fig planted on top of it. In time the fig's roots will engulf and 'strangle' the stone, an artwork designed to be slowly undone by the rainforest it sits in, which is, in the end, the whole story of this place.