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Published: October 20th 2009
Day 175 - Karijini National Park
Hey, it’s the birthday of somebody special today! That’s right Emma Gosling, we’re talking about you! Happy Birthday chick, sorry we’re not there to share the cake but we hope you have a great day and we’ll speak to you soon. Amazing, we woke up to a new sound this morning; the sound of swarming bees! They spooked us out a bit because they sounded like they were trying to get in the caravan through the fly nets! They were so loud we thought we were at least surrounded but when Darryl took a look he could hardly see any! Weird!
Time to get out of bed anyway, there’s lots of walking to be had!
Karijini is the second largest national park in Western Australia and offers many different levels of walking tracks. A number of the sections require abseil and/or rock climbing ability and equipment so there will be parts we won’t be able to do but we’re not stopping until we run out of ground beneath our feet!
We set off, in the car, down the track leading out of the campground and in the general direction of
Weano Gorge. It’s still reasonably early, just gone 7am, but already the sun has climbed high in the sky so it won’t be long before we start feeling the heat.
Look out! Emu! Darryl was quick to spot the early morning bird and brought PIE to a stand still which was just as well because the beautiful Emu was closely followed by her two little ones! They were gorgeous!
There were already cars in the Weano gorge car park but astonishingly when we set off on the walk to Hand Rail Pool we didn’t see another soul! The walk is lovely, bit of a challenge to keep your feet dry which I fail miserably with but never mind - who wants dry feet anyway! We’re clambering over rocks, wading through cold water and edging around rock ledges but then the real fun starts! The walk leads down to a pool and it’s a reasonably steep descent with a hand rail to assist you - hence the name! The final short drop on to the ledge by the side of the pool is by a knotted rope which is also the way you clamber back up. It’s a bit
of a giggle getting down there but we manage it with no problem at all. We’re all alone in this huge amphitheatre and the acoustics are awesome!
We guess that to get to the next section you have to swim across the pool, so Darryl goes to check things out! Once he’s over the other side he has to clamber onto the rocks then walk through a narrow gorge where you have to walk with your legs on either side of the chasm walls, then swim through another smaller but much colder pool which leads him to an almost sheer drop. It must be the abseil section! There’s another pool below but if you got down there you would almost certainly need a rope to pull you out! There are tours which continue through at this point but they have all the right equipment where as we don’t so Darryl heads back.
The clamber out from Hand Rail Pool was just as funny as the clamber in! Luckily there was still nobody else around to witness it so we can say that we did it perfectly, used the rope to haul ourselves up efficiently and there was certainly
no slippage from either of us at any point!
Just as we were heading through the narrowest part of the return walk we met a huge tour group rampaging towards us. Their leader is in bare feet and smirks when he spies my wet boots! Well, at least I did the walk - wet feet or not!
We let the tour group pass, it was easy than trying to do a head to head battle and then we reach the section where I got my feet wet coming in! We manage it much better in reverse and clamber up the ledges and over the rocks in the creek bed. Perfect!
We wandered along to the Oxer and Junction Pool lookouts, wow what a view. It’s breathtaking, absolutely stunning. Sadly there’s a memorial here for a volunteer rescuer, Jimmy Regan, who died during a rescue mission deep in Hancocks Gorge - “This celtic cross marks the spot where on the 3rd April 2004 the body of Newman State Emergency Service Volunteer Jim Reegan was recovered from Hancock Gorge. Jim gave his life whilst performing a Cliff Rescue of an injured visitor to Karijini. At 4am a flash flood
swept Jimmy and other rescuers down the gorge. The tragic result of this was the death of Jim. As a mark of respect the pool below this point has been renamed Reegan’s Pool and will stand as a stark reminder to all, that entering the gorges is dangerous and puts other people’s lives at risk when things go wrong. Jim’s family, children, friends and SES volunteers from Newman and Tom Price miss him dearly, but with this cross Jim maybe gone but by know means forgotten. RIP Jimmy ‘Irish’ Reegan”.
We meet a young couple with English accents while we’re here and it turns out that their ‘holiday’ of just over two years is coming to an end shortly. They’ll be back in the Lake District for Christmas with no plans to return. Just goes to show that there’s no place like home for the dedicated but if we had to make a choice between the Lake District and Karijini the one that gets more sun would probably win!
There’s one more challenge for us to do today and that is get as far along Hancock Gorge as we can before the ground disappears beneath our feet! It
starts with a steep descent down a reasonably well formed but natural track and then presents you with a ladder to aide another short sharp drop. We clamber over the rocks and edge along the rock ledges til we get to a pool, Reegan’s Pool. Here you can clamber up the rock ledges or you can wade / swim through the pool. Darryl choices to climb and I eventually, after much consideration, choose to swim! It’s not far, probably less than 100 metres and it brings us to an amphitheatre where the ‘Spider Walk’ begins. This is another narrow section where the water is flowing through the middle and the rocks are covered with algae so you can’t walk through as it’s too slippery. What you have to do is walk the walls with one hand and foot either side, like a spider but with 4 ‘legs’ not 8!
We meet another tour group at this point, one of the adventure ones who are going to continue through the gorge by abseiling. There’s a very capable young lady leading the group of about 10 people and with their proper grippy ‘wet’ shoes they make reasonably short work of the
Spider walk.
Doing the walk in bare feet like we did isn’t too bad either, there’s a couple of iffy moments where the rocks are so slippery you think you’re going to fall and Dar gets pushed forward by the rucksack at one point which slams him into the rock pretty hard and slashes his hand. Luckily he’s fine.
That led us to Kermit’s Pool which is quite small but also quite deep. It’s a great spot for a float around and it’s interesting to watch the tour group leader start to rig up the ropes for her group to abseil down into the next section. She makes it look so easy but where she’s standing is quite a high drop over the rock into a deep pool and without a rope there’s no getting out of there. A couple of lads start to make their way down closer and closer to the point of no return, perhaps thinking about making the dive into the pool below. They eventually figure out the obvious and climb back to the top.
All of a sudden there’s more whooping and hollering behind us, a small group of mine workers on
leave for the weekend are making their way down Spider Walk on their bottoms! It’s hilarious to watch, grown men slip sliding all over the place - very funny. It’s a wonder they don’t break any bones as they fall about over the rocks but we then realise they’ve had a bit to drink. They’re a nice enough group of blokes but they’re pushing the boundaries now as they too make their way over and watch the abseil group. The group have thrown all their tubes into the waterfall which starts at the top where we’re sitting. One of the ‘merry’ chaps sits at the top of the waterfall where the rocks are so slippery one wrong move will send him down into the tubes and the deep pool that the group are abseiling into. Darryl tries to warn him and tells him to quickly move and then with a sharp tone the group leader yells “You are less than 2 seconds from disaster. If you fall into that pool I am not coming to rescue you.” With that the chap seems to come to his senses, carefully picks himself up and moves away from the edge. It’s easy to
see how people get hurt down here, it’s like an adventure playground.
It’s time for us to leave as we spot another tour group coming through, it’s the same ones we met at Hand Rail Pool so I show their leader my bare feet rather than my soggy boots and he gives me a ‘well done’ rye smile!
We make light work of the Spider Walk going out and jump across the rocks through the amphitheatre, not through choice but they’re so hot they’re burning the soles of our bare feet! After a spot of lunch, Darryl carries on with the climb back through and I swim it to cool my feet off! Triumphantly we make it to the ladder and it’s a breeze from that point, steep climb accepted!
On the way back to camp we take in the views of Joffre and Knox gorges, both beautiful and then have another look at the Visitors Centre rewarding our efforts with an ice cream!
A quick look at Circular Pool from the look out is enough to tell us it’s beautiful but that a swim back at our ‘old’ haunt of Fern Pool will be just
as pleasurable! Turns out that was a top choice because shortly after we arrived almost everybody else left so we had the water to ourselves! Beautiful! We could spend hours here just relaxing and looking at the waterfalls.
We haven’t worked out a good spot for sunset in Karijini, there must be something somewhere but we made our way back to the caravan for dinner and at half six had our first visit from a dingo! What a beauty he was too but obviously we can’t encourage him to stay and we certainly didn’t feed him so he didn’t hang around! Just before 8 o’clock we heard them howling behind us, magic to hear them so close by!
What a great day we’ve had, I bet this is the best nights sleep we’ll get in ages!!
Dar and Sar
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Tony
non-member comment
New climbing position
Gudday Wallabies, Looks like you have arrived in yet another amazing looking place looks like the fishing would be good. Was the censored picture taken from the Kama Sutra ?? Think it may be the crab or lotus maybe !! Enjoy Tony