Karijini National Park

Friday:  After a good breakfast I headed east on the road towards Newman and Port Hedland. Beautiful landscapes along the way.  Sadly the camera doesn’t seem to really capture the varied landforms mark the journey.  100km along brings one to the Karijini National Park.  Fees payable by honour box.  There is an excellent Visitors Centre there that traces the history of this area of the Hamersley Ranges and its peoples, ancient and modern.  The area was purely pastoral until the 1960’s  when mining arrived.  Interesting pictorial stories of the Aboriginal people who worked here as station hands and homestead servants.  Lots of the kids were removed as part of the stolen generation affair.
I only visited one corner of the park – the Dales Gorge area.  Spectacular.  This is not a typical mountain gorge.  In fact it lies in the middle of a flat plateau covered with scrub and trees.  You don’t see any sign of the gorge until you virtually are on top of it.  It is a very deep rift, semicircular and 4 or so km long.  It has been carved into the rock surface over millennia by earth movement and water erosion.  It is fed at one end by Fortescue Falls, and ends at the other in a huge rock pool.  I ventured down to the level of the falls; was hardly able to breathe by the time I reached to top again, in 35C temperature.
On the way back I pulled in at Mt Bruce, 1235m and WA’s second highest peak.  From a lookout at its base one can see across to the Marrandoo mine site.  This is owned by Hamersley Ore ( a bit like Aldi compared to Coles (Rio Tinto) and Woollies (BHP Billiton) in competition terms). It has a life of 30 years.  What is interesting is that all of these mines run their own trains down to Dampier or Port Hedland; but when the ore gets there, it is all graded and mixed together before shipping to provide a consistent quality of product for export.
Long drive back to Paraburdoo this afternoon (160km);  nice surprise when I got to my room, a birthday message from the family and a nice bottle of WA Fifth Leg shiraz.  Most welcome!
Early plane back to Perth in the morning, so I’ll be giving Paraburdoo’s wild Friday night club scene a miss .
The latest pics are here