Six-fifteen on a Saturday, mist still sitting low over Baldwin's Bay, and I had the Serpentine Falls lookout entirely to myself. By nine there were four tour buses in the car park and a queue for the barbecue shelters. That's the whole argument for camping near Serpentine National Park right there, and it's why I keep coming back to the same handful of sites whenever I want a proper early start on the trail.
Why the falls trail rewards getting there before everyone else
Serpentine National Park sits about an hour south-east of the city off the South Western Highway, and it punches well above its size for a place with no overnight camping of its own. The Kitty's Gorge track through jarrah and marri forest to the falls is short by WA standards, but it gets flogged by day visitors from about 10am on weekends, especially in the warmer months when Baldwin's Bay becomes the unofficial swimming hole for half the Peel region. Walk it at first light and you get the wildlife still moving, cooler air under the canopy, and none of the picnic-rug traffic jams at the lookout.
The catch is that the park itself is strictly day-use. There's no campground inside the boundary, so anyone wanting that dawn start has to solve the accommodation puzzle a bit further out, and that's where most people get it wrong.
The camping problem right at the park gate
People assume there'll be a caravan park more or less at the entrance. There isn't, not really, and the closest options that do exist are aimed at day-trippers rather than vanners wanting a quiet overnight before an early walk. I've had a look at the caravan park right in the Dwellingup township on a few occasions and, look, it's fine, but I reckon it's overpriced for what you actually get on a powered site midweek. You're paying resort-adjacent rates for a patch of gravel with decent amenities and not much else. Fair enough if you want the pub across the road, but if all you need is a level site and a working dump point before an early trail start, there are better value options a short drive further into the forest.
Lane Poole Reserve and Nanga Mill: the real basecamp
My actual answer, and the one I give anyone who asks, is to base at Lane Poole Reserve, specifically the Nanga Mill or Nanga Brook camping areas run by DBCA. They're roughly a 25 to 30 minute drive from the Serpentine Falls car park depending on which loop you take through Dwellingup, and they sit right on the Murray River with proper vehicle-accessible sites, toilets, and enough tree cover to keep the van cool into November. I stayed a night at Nanga Mill a couple of winters back, annex up, kettle on, and woke to genuine frost on the windscreen and kangaroos grazing about ten metres off. That's the sort of overnight that sets you up properly for a 6am walk rather than a groggy start after a night squeezed into a roadside rest area.
If you're making a weekend of the wider Dwellingup area anyway, it's worth reading through our piece on camping at Dwellingup for a Munda Biddi weekend, since the logistics overlap almost entirely with a Serpentine trip. Same forest, same towns for supplies, same general drive time from Perth.
Getting there without your own rig
Public transport won't get you to the park gate, and I won't pretend otherwise. Transperth services run as far as Mundijong and Byford, but from there you're still looking at a decent drive or a lift to the falls car park, and there's certainly nothing running before sunrise on a Saturday. If you're van-based this is a non-issue, you just drive the last stretch the night before and sleep on it. If you're relying on transit, treat Serpentine as a daytime-only trip and plan your early walk for a different weekend when someone can run you out there.
What the DBCA site actually costs, and the track notes worth checking
Camping fees at DBCA-managed sites like Nanga Mill are charged per adult per night, with concession and family rates available, and it's worth checking current pricing before you go since it does get reviewed. Bookings can fill on long weekends, particularly Munda Biddi season when mountain bikers flood the Dwellingup area, so I'd get in early if you're planning around a specific date. For anyone stitching the walk into a bigger loop involving the Bibbulmun Track corridor, the Bibbulmun Track Foundation site has decent maps and section notes for the stretch running through this part of the northern jarrah forest, which is handy context even if you're only doing the Serpentine day walk and not the full track.
Comparing early-start walks elsewhere in the state
Serpentine isn't the only spot where camping nearby buys you a better walk. Down at Esperance, the same logic applies to Cape Le Grand to Wylie Bay, where the coastal light at dawn is genuinely worth losing sleep for and the car park fills fast once the day gets going. Further south-west, sections of the Cape to Cape Track get considerably hotter and busier as the day wears on, so basing at a nearby campground the night before rather than driving down that morning makes a real difference in comfort. And if you want a shorter regional option with the same early-start philosophy, the Wiilman Bilya Trail is worth a look, it's a different part of the south-west entirely but the pattern of camp-close-then-walk-early holds up there as well.
For anyone reading this and thinking bigger, the same principle scales right up. Our 15 Day Kimberley Ultimate Camping Tour runs on exactly this rhythm, camps set close to the walking country each night so the group is moving before the heat properly sets in. It's a much longer commitment than a weekend at Serpentine, but the logic that got you out of the van at 6am for Kitty's Gorge is the same logic that gets a Kimberley group onto the trail before 40 degree afternoons roll in.
What I'd actually pack for the early walk
Nothing exotic. A headtorch you've actually tested, because the track from the Nanga camping areas to Serpentine Falls has you loading the van in the dark more often than not. A thermos rather than trying to boil water trailside, since jarrah forest mornings in the Peel hills run cooler than most people expect even in shoulder season. And decent shoes, because Kitty's Gorge has enough loose rock and root crossings near the creek that thongs or sandals will end your morning early. None of that's groundbreaking advice, but I still see people turn up at 6am in the wrong footwear because they assumed a short walk meant an easy one.
The falls themselves run seasonally, best from winter through early spring, so time the camp for that window if the water's the point of the trip. Outside those months you're walking a lovely forest track to a mostly dry rock face, which is still worth doing but worth knowing in advance so nobody's disappointed standing there at 6.30am wondering where the water went.