Awake early after an awesome nights sleep, so we got up & organised and headed down the road after breakfast .
Today's destination , Karijini National Park . We were only about 60 kms away , so we arrived and checked in , set up and headed off again - all this done and it was only 10 am !!!
We decide to head to the furthest gorge - Weano Gorge , as there was plenty to see & do - there is the junction of 4 gorges - Weano , Hancock , Joffre and Red Gorge .
The road in is bitumen till the Visitors Centre , then it turns to our favourite, corrugated with lots of loose sharp rocks . We quickly stopped and let some air out of the tyres , you could tell the vehicles that hadn't done , they were going very slowly and getting everything shaken to pieces !!
Arriving at Weano Gorge , there is an enormous car park , we continued down to Junction Pool Lookout and Oxer Lookout and parked . The gorges are a bit different to what we expected , they aren't enormous or extremely deep , but what they lack there is made up elsewhere.
They get as deep as 100 m and also very narrow , you are canyoning when you take a walk down into them , they get very narrow , and you can touch both sides easily !! The sides are near vertical with stratified red rock , an amazing sight in itself , highly polished from all the abrasion when they flood .
Wild flowers were in bloom everywhere , and there were many different varieties- orange , white , pink , purple & yellow , then there's the new green growth on the gum trees & spinifex . They give this extremely harsh environment a soft touch .
We followed the track down into Lower Weano Gorge , to find crystal clear pools , small waterfalls, trees and grasses , till you reach the narrow parts . You are required to do some wading through some pools , and a lot of rock hopping, before you get to the end where it goes to about a metre wide . Then you walk down the watercourse into a pool chamber , before getting narrower , then opening to a pool about 20 metres in diameter , the track ends there , they have put a handrail in to assist people down the rock face . Not the place to be in flash flooding , one SES Rescuer died while rescuing a stranded/ injured walker several years ago !
We sat and had lunch in the shade of a tree , before returning to the ute and going round to Joffre Falls and Knox Gorge . Joffre Falls had a bit more than a trickle going over it into a plunge pool, then into another long pool. The falls are a whole heap of rock shelves that the water cascades over .
Knox Gorge was another 6 kms away , has a lookout and some serious walks , we did the lookout !!
Back out and 17 kms later, we were at Kalamina Gorge , here there's a lookout and a walk . The lookout has no barriers , just a 30 m drop to keep you on your toes !! There were 2 fallen paperbarks that covered up the view of the falls , but we looked anyway . The track down to the gorge wasn't bad , so we gave it a go , a bit of rock hopping here and there and we were onto the flat rock shelf that formed the bottom of the gorge .
Back in the ute , and it was 3:45 , time to head for home , a beer is going to go down well !!!
Negotiating the rutted & corrugated track again was fun - not !!! Overall we did 130 kms in the park today - with 30 of them on bitumen .
Back home , it was nice to be relaxing with a nice cold beer and some salsa .
The temperature up here only got to 28 today , courtesy of being up in the mountains , might be a bit cooler tonight !!!
Today's map link :-https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=z1G8gwwxwyYo.kZb-_2vVu5A4&usp=sharing
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