DiNo's Travels Around Australia - 2014/2015/16/17: Day 94

Today we covered 373km around the Karijini National Park, in the Hamersley Ranges. The attractions in this park are so very different from those we have encountered elsewhere. Most significant is that the rock is different and it has weathered differently. It is dark red and the rock form is cleated. It has faces in the rock that are regular, flat, often shiny and occur at right angles to each other.

From a mature person's perspective the gorges are a delight to view. You arrive at every one on top of the gorge's rim and have but a couples of hundred meters at most to walk to see the gorge. Fantastic! The one downside was that portion of the gorge is often in shade. That probably is a consequence of the gorges being narrow, straight sided and quite deep eg 100m or more. Oh, one should mention that there was a lot of gravel road to drive and dust was unavoidable. Negatives aside, they were forgotten in the face of the beauty and grandeur of what we saw.

The Park has an excellent Visitor's Centre and having briefed ourselves at the Centre, we hit the corrugations. Oxer Lookout, which is the conjunction of four gorges, Red, Hancock, Weano and Joffre Gorges, was spectacular. It was 100m deep and the viewing platform was set a little over the rim of the gorge. It was impossible to photograph the whole of the scene.

Joffre Gorge and Falls were next on the itinerary and while not much water was coming over the falls, there were permanent water pools in the gorge.

Kalamina Gorge came next. There a small waterfall cascaded down the curved multicoloured rock face into another of these deep red walled gorges.

Dales Gorge may have been the most spectacular individual gorge with the Fortescue Falls in one arm and in a second, the large Circular Pool.

We saw also Mount Bruce, Western Australia's second highest mountain at 1235m and the drive through the Mudjina East Gorge was excellent. It has a viewing lookout called the Albert Tognolini Lookout.

Today's gorge odyssey was worth every second, every bone jarring corrugation and every mouthful of red dust we experienced - and we have a "filthy" car to prove it.