We stayed in Karijini National Park WA on a caravan/campsite at Dales Campground. This National Park had been mentioned as a ‘must do’ by most West Australians we have met along the way, although we hadn’t heard of it. Well, they were right – we rated this park equally as impressive as Carnarvon Gorge in QLD but with much easier access and less people.

West Australian National Parks only charge $9 p/p per night so are heavily booked even though they only have toilet facilities (not even water!). This NP is huge and today we drove 50km on dirt roads to get to Weano Gorge/Hammond Gorge and Kermit’s pool. There is always some water in these gorges because they are spring fed.

The rocks are full of iron ore, magnesium, blue asbestos and other minerals making for the most amazing colours which vary throughout the day depending on the angle of the sun and stacked block effects. Kermit’s pool was quite a difficult walk in over lots of slabs of rock followed by a vertical climb down (using a handrail) to this lovely circular deep swimming hole. Water flows out one end down through more huge and fairly tight chasms which you need to swim/clamber along until you get to the roped off 20m vertical drop. Accidents are common on this particular walk and 2 weeks ago someone slipped and died, so they are serious with their warnings. Also you must make sure no rain is about because of flash flooding – easy to see why!

And so for a quick geology lesson on Karijini. The Hamersley Range region is one of the Earth’s oldest, containing rocks that have been in existence for 3500 years (at that time most of the earth’s crust had not solidified!) It looked very different in the past when huge glaciers scraped the landscape and other times the conditions were wet, hot and tropical. During the formation processes there were ocean basins, volcanic eruptions, plate uplifts, meteorite strikes and of course weathering. The formation of the gorges occurred over the last 100 million years (recall the dinosaurs of Hughenden were around 100 million years) resulting in these spectacular gorges cut into the surrounding plains.