Leaving Exmouth we said goodbye to the sea for a while as we were heading inland to the Pilbara region towards Tom Price and then Karijini National Park. We took our time, 5 days, to travel 650 kms as it was school holidays and knew it would be pretty busy at this time.
We were now heading into the red dirt area, where if there is a breeze or a car drives by, a fine red powdery dust gets swept up in the air and gets into everything. It's no use wearing light coloured clothes as they show up the red dirt very easily and washing it out is very hard. Petrol in this area is quite expensive, about $1.80 per litre.
At one of the camp sites we stopped at on our way through to Karijini we were sitting around a camp fire in the evening with a number of people and one of the ladies mentioned she was going to put on the central heating in the caravan. Definitely home away from home. Even though it was lovely and warm during the day, around 26 deg, the nights were quite cold, getting down to 4-5 degs. Before arriving into Tom Price, we passed through a small mining town of Paraburdoo. This was our first glimpse of some of the iron ore mining going on in the area.
Tom Price
This town is apparently the highest township in Western Australia, being 747 mtrs above sea level and was named after Thomas Moore Price who worked for an American company, Kaiser Steel. He was the one who convinced the mining companies to start mining in this area. He also played a major role in the exporting of the iron ore. Sadly he died at the age of 71 back in America from a heart attack, 2 hours after being told of the very rich ore deposit discovered on the mountain here. Henceforth, the town and mountain were named after him.
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| Mt Nameless |
It is a massive open cut mine, operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Iron ore is excavated out of the hills and transported by huge trucks, sorted and crushed before being loaded into train wagons from conveyor belts. The trains stretch for a distance of over 2 1/2 kms in length and these then make their way north to the port of Dampier to be shipped overseas. Looking around while in this place, everything is much the same colour, a rusty red. It's nice to see a patch of green grass which is rare.
All these photos are of the Rio Tinto open cut mine in Tom Price
Karijini National Park
Karijini is the second largest National Park in Western Australia. We had been told that this was a place we shouldn't miss, with it's spectacular gorges, waterfalls and rock pools. There are only 2 camp grounds within the National Park, an eco-friendly one and Dales Campground. We headed towards the latter but by the time we got there the sign was out saying it was full, so we spent the night in the overflow area. This also filled up overnight. We managed to get into Dales the next day along with many families and children as it was school holidays. Through the night we could hear the dingoes howling but they were a fair distance away.
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| Dales Gorge |
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| Fortesque Falls and pool |
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| Fern Pool |
The campground is just a short distance away from Dales Gorge so there was no need for the car. The tracks are well signposted so it was easy to find our way to Fortesque Falls and Fern Pool where we had a delightful cool swim and shower under the waterfall.
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| Circular Pool |
We were refreshed enough to walk the couple of kms along the bottom of the gorge to Circular Pool which at the time was in the shade and not as inviting. A beautiful area and amazing rock formations. Being the dry season there wasn't much water flowing through but you could see the build up of vegetation against the trees telling us of the tremendous strength of the water which would flow through at certain times of the year.
The next day we were off to visit other gorges, 56 kms away and all on dirt road, the last 14 kms were bad and very corrugated. Slow, was the way to go so it took 2 hours. This gorge was not as beautiful as Dales Gorge but more spectacular and more fun. It felt more like being at a playground. Some areas we had to get to involved wading through waist deep water, climbing down ladders, rock ledges and in one case doing a spider walk with water rushing through underneath us. It was a lot of fun and slightly challenging. It was a great day, but then we had to face the drive back. It wasn't very nice when the 4WD's would go tearing past us creating heaps of dust. That made us think about getting a 4WD next time around.
We spent 2 more days resting at Dales, actually going back and having more swims in Fern Pool as it was so delightful, biding our time to get the school holidays over with before heading up north on the Great Northern Hwy towards Dampier and Karatha.
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