Day 29

Karijini National Park - Dales Gorge

"Listen to the motion of the wind in the mountains, maybe you can hear them talking like I do......"

We had our first sleep in of the trip today - 8am! We didn't need to drive anywhere today and spent the day enjoying the gorge (Dales Gorge) where we are camping. We extended our stay first up after breakfast - a whole $18! The kids also qualified as Junior Karijini Park Rangers too so they received their badges and qualifications at the same time.

On the walk back we came across a pancake snake which had the kids intrigued too!

We kitted up with hydration packs, morning tea and lunch and decided to do a loop walk which would take us on a descend at one end and an ascend at the other and would cover the whole of the gorge - effectively combining a class 4 and class 3 walk together.

Following the descend, we turned left and trekked to Circular Pool. It's a large 30m round aqua coloured pool at the bottom surrounded by sheer cliffs and a spring fed waterfall. The water wasn't too cold but we had more trekking to do so moved on - no swim.

We needed to backtrack to where we got to the gorge floor to pick up the track to Fortescue Falls and Fern Pool. This was only a 1.5km walk but was almost in a 180 degree turn of the gorge floor and was quite tricky in some parts with multiple water crossings, small waterfalls to climb, rock traversing and loose boulder negotiating. It was quite an interesting walk and at all times we were surrounded by sheer iron ore filled cliffs. The ore is everywhere in the park and if it wasn't a National Park, I guess it would look more like that of Tom Price which would be a great shame! Lucky that's not going to happen.

We were rewarded after our walk with a spectacular waterfall called Fortescue Falls which we could climb from bottom to top over the rocks easily. The view from the top back down the gorge was great too. No swimming either for us at the falls as we were headed to a better place.

It was only another 500 metres walk to Fern Pool which was a beautiful calm pool - filled with aqua coloured clear water and about a 100m swim to a plunging waterfall. This was a great pool to swim in - a bit brisk at first when you got in but it was in the sun and everyone had a swim. 4 x CMJs swam out to the waterfall. Cobes had a brief swim and decided enough was enough - it was a deep pool which you couldn't stand in at all. Cayla pretended that I was a turtle and grabbed a lift on my back most of the way out and Cayden swam with Corinne next to us. It was a pretty big swim for them but they managed comfortably.

Had a nice rest back at the van in the late afternoon after a busy few days of walking.

Tomorrow we hit the road to head back North and back to the coast around Port Headland.