Karijini National Park

Karijini National Park, is situated off the highway between Port Hedland and Newman, and down the road towarsd Tom Price, in the middle of "mining country". "Dere's lots of minerals in dem dere hills"

Beautiful gorge country - this highway was a major engineering construction, finding the best way through for the heavy mining road trains. This one wasn't moving very fast!

Wildflowers starting to blossom

Dales Gorge, at the southern end of the NP, where we camped
in the 'Bungarra (lizard) Loop'

The Dale's Camp was very dry, very red, very dusty and very hot - mid 30's. (and the toilets were very "stinky"!). However, the scenery was magnificent.

The main gorge walk in this area was fantastic - you could park at either end (or if you were feeling  really adventurous you could walk from camp...???), and then do a walk down to a waterhole at either end! Magnificent when the weather is warm. We began with a walk past Fortescue Falls, to Fern Pool.

Jon, in the middle of Fern Pool realised he still
had the press button car keys in his pocket!
 Oops!! All okay tho' thankfully - they are
 obviously a bit waterproof.

Square "cut" layers of rock make the
ledges for the waterfall.

Fortescue Falls

The walking trail then led alongside the river for a couple of kilometres, through a beautiful gorge. Trees, rocks, colours, birds ...were amazing!

 The square corners of the rich, red,  rock
were a real feature of the formations along
 the Gorge.

Paper bark

Then to a steep climb up to a lookout over the other end of the gorge. Meanwhile stomachs were growling and we decided to come back after lunch for a cool off swim in Circular Pool, further along this end of the gorge.

Lookout where we could view three branches of the gorge coming together.

Circular Pool

After a bit of a rest, cool drink, food etc, we were ready to tackle the steep descent down to Circular Pool. This end of the gorge gets no direct sunlight throughout the day. Hence, the water is a tad cold. I exaggerate actually - the water was FREEZING! So cold that when you jumped in, it was a quick circle around and head for the bank again, and when you got out your limbs seemed to feel a really "hot flush". (nothing to do with menopause ... just the nerves responding to the intense cold). Invigorating to say the least! but you wouldn't want to stay on for very long.

Man -made cement pools?? No... just the way this rock weathered, with it's square corners.  

The late afternoon colours were quite intense.

Then it was back to camp for a warm, solar-bag shower as the sun went down!

If you've heard of Wittenoom Gorge (which I had as a child), this is on the edge of the Karijini NP, but a part of the country that the Governmmet prefers to forget. Wittenoom is the place where asbestos was mined in it's raw state, and the town has now had all of it's services removed and is not advertised on any brochures etc, and has become a real ghost town. Some people evidently choose to live there still, and do so at their own risk, with generators etc and no services of any kind from the Govt. We didn't visit this area, but several people informed us on our walking that the fibrousy, "blue" chunks of rock we could see was asbestos. ??

Whatever, the area was amazing to see and if we had more time there I would have been tempted to go and check out the ghost town!