Day 85 16/6/2011 Karijini National Park – exploring.

Day 85 16/6/2011 Karijini National Park – exploring.



The walking track in Kalamina Gorge!!



Exhausted is how today ended but it is that kind of good tired, the one where you have had a great day but at the end of it your body is really tired.

We started the day slowly with pancakes for breakfast, this has quickly become the children’s favourite breakfast of the trip!!  After breakfast we headed off to the visitor information centre to call a medical practice in Tom Price (the next closest town) because Zac’s foot was still swollen and very painful.  Luckily I have been able to get him an appointment for tomorrow – how cool is that!! Because we were heading out for the whole day Zac came with us. I made sure he packed his school work but he also brought his fishing books!! I can probably guess which one will be opened and read.



and then the track got even harder - Kalamina Gorge



The first gorge that we headed to was Kalamina Gorge.  This gorge offered us a 3km – 3 hour walk where we had to descend the stone steps into the gorge and then got to explore the waterfall when we headed up stream and then when we turned around and headed down stream we could rock hop and rock climb as far as the Rock Arch Pool.  The constantly changing geological formations during this walk kept us all very interested, the kids also had a great time looking for fish in the shallow water holes. 

We returned to the car just before lunch with Zac exclaiming that he had done “heaps” of school work!! But as we drove to the next falls he began to tell us about all the people that he had spoken to whilst we were walking and I am not sure that he got any work completed….

This was the track down into Knox Gorge -
straight down the hill!!

After lunch we took the short walk to Joffre Lookout.  The waterfall was huge and curved.  As there wasn’t a walk to the bottom of the waterfall we headed off to Knox Gorge.

Knox Gorge started with a lookout where I jokingly said would it be funny if the walk took us under this lookout – at the time we were about 100m’s above the gorge floor.  We dropped Zac back to the car and then headed down the goat track that zig zagged down the cliff face to the bottom of the gorge and then we did walk up and get the opportunity to stand right under the lookout.  We scrambled down the gorge floor, Pete and I were stunned by the layer upon layer of perfectly laid rock!! It is so perfectly laid that each slither is uniform in depth and the colour variances between each slither was amazing.  Claudia and Callum just loved scrambling over the rocks and running ahead to find the next number on the rocks that indicated that we were still on the right track.



On the way back we reluctantly started the scramble back up the cliff face, the terrain was slippery with many rocks moving under our feet.  With Pete in the lead I was confident that we would make it back without any problems, but alas at about half way up I noticed that the path just didn’t look right – we were on a path as there were other foot prints besides ours but it quickly became apparent that we had taken a wrong turn!!  There was a split second then when we both went “oh heck” we’re lost so we quickly turned around and walked back till we recognised the right track and then we could see that the track had given Pete two options to veer left or right – he chose left but we needed to go right.  Once we were back on the right track the kids quickly spotted the markers and we made it back to the car and Zac with no problems.  It is really easy to see though how people get lost in the bush as one mound of spinifex looks just the same as the next!!



the sign said DANGER go back!! - Knox Gorge



Oh did I mention that our fly veils made a much needed reappearance today?? Unbelievable, the flies were so think that at one stage I sprayed aerogard over my fly veil!!  Desert flies are sticky persistent things and we have not had them so thick and pesky since we left Central Australia.  Oh well, can’t have everything, the weather was perfect for walking, a cool 21 and if flies are all we have to complain about I should shoosh up!!

Again I’m not sure how much school work Zac got done, but he hasn’t been complaining and his day wasn’t much fun!! 

Claudia and Callum are tired out but when we returned to the caravan the three of them jumped on their bikes to go find the friends that they had made today whilst we were out walking.  Periodically we meet other families with kids around our kids ages, our kids love it and really enjoy playing with their peers.  They tell us that they don’t miss their house or going to school, they just miss their friends!!



Knox Gorge



Overall a very successful day, I really can’t explain how beautiful the gorges are in Karijini National Park, we have now walked in limestone gorges, sandstone gorges and now gorges with banded iron formations.  The gorges in Karijini provide a stark contrast to the arid plains above them in fact when we were driving to and from the waterfalls and gorges today it was hard to imagine looking across the arid plains that such beautiful, refreshing retreats existed at all.

I’m confident we will all sleep like rocks tonight after all our climbing and clambering up and down hills and over river beds!!