Return. This is the usual morning pattern: 1) I get
up and walk or run around early when first light wakes me (a longtime habit);
2) when I get back, Paul has usually made coffee; 3) the day can fully
start. We pack up and leave. I drive more gingerly. Our goal, we hope, is Mornington Wilderness
Camp, run by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. Reservations required, but telecommunications
are down (there is no public internet at all, as far as I can tell). Back on the Gibb then, and around 60 kms to
the Mornington turn off. I call them on
the shortwave radio provided at the junction.
Que lastima, they are full up. So
back east on the Gibb to the turn off to the other Australian Wildlife
Conservancy property in the Kimberley, Charnley
River Station. Gates. Cows. 49 km of good track. Plenty of space available. I can’t resist giving the AWC staffer my
business card. She brightens up at this
and gives me a bunch of AWC magazines.
A nice open campground, plenty of
space:
This is the bed of the truck:
note built in fridge/freezer on left, drawers below and storage. All rather dusty at this point:
Although it’s still mid-morning,
as you might expect by now, it is hot and there are a few flies. After yesterday, we are both tired. So we sit in the shade, migrating as
needed. I read the AWC literature. It’s promotional of course, but very sedate
and science-rich compared to American equivalents. They are clearly doing very good work. Chat with Graeme, the campground host, as he
moves sprinklers around. Evaporation of
water as it sprays helps keep the air a bit cooler. We are careful when we visit the showers and
restrooms:
Lunch. Eventually, I feel like I have enough energy
to wander back over to the reception area.
I have a lovely 45 minute chat with Jess, the AWC staffer who checked us
in. I never did find out what her actual
job was. Anyway, really interesting to
learn about what AWC does; a mixture of land and species conservation. Cool and crucial work, very
science-based. Yes, I would work for
them.
Afternoon. We manage to activate and drive out to Dillie
Gorge for sunset:
Saturday June 15 – On morning walkabout, Charnley River is
indescribably lovely and appealing. I’ve
been experiencing the Kimberley for a good week already, but so much motion and
stimulation. This is my first real
connection. I suddenly really like being
here. I can see why people get attached
to this land, it’s got a very alive quality, a harsh beauty. Evidence:
Pack and leave with some regret,
but the need to move on. Pause at
Imintji, a roadhouse/campground/art gallery on Aboriginal land. It’s got diet Pepsi and fresh vegetables,
which is good. We add our trash to the
rubbish tip, which is a giant smorgasbord for crows, which is not good.
On to Bell Gorge, which most of
our resources describe as the prettiest gorge near the Gibb. It’s in the King Leopold Ranges Conservation
Park, which encompasses much of the northwest-southeast trending series of
ridges that define the west boundary of the Kimberley. More quartzite.
A 30 km track. The campground looks chockablock, we won’t be
staying there. To the carpark, where
many cars, trucks and buses are parked.
A 4 km Grade 2 track, mostly sand.
I hear the falls. They don’t look
too spectacular at first:
Lots of whooping and hollering
from downstream. I traverse up a ledge,
and oh, now I get it:
A pool full of swimming
Australians. Paul has observed that if
you want to attract the natives, tell them there is a place to splash about in
the water. I count 3 dozen people, all
sizes, shapes and ages. They seem to be
having a great time. I walk past a large
tour group of pensioners, shepherded by a tour guide. They look tired. I don’t feel the need to join the swimmers or
pensioners, so I take more pictures:
Yet another explanation – you may
sense a slightly misanthropic value in the preferred places on this trip. This is not about disliking people, it’s
about being able to get lost in the natural world in whatever way feels right –
photography, contemplation, observation – with minimal distraction from the
human milieu. Semi-solitude is good. I have been this way since my teens. It’s my inner-directed nature to some degree,
but also being able to appreciate what’s there.
Without chatter. Without screens.
We leave Bell Gorge. A bit further down the Gibb and another turn
north toward Mt. Hart Station. Mt. Hart was on my list of interesting places to go, it is supposed to have
somewhat different flora and geology.
There are many advertising flags at the turn off; they are trying hard
to attract visitors. 50 kms of windy
track but in pretty good nick. A sharp
turn at the “Mt.Hart International Airport” airstrip, and we arrive. Mt. Hart in the distance.
A bit dazed from the driving and
the day so far. Reception. Paul rings the bell, and Ali appears (we
learn her name later). Once she speaks,
it’s clear she’s not from these parts.
Paul chats her up; she’s from London, by way of a year working in Bali. She has trouble talking as she’s got a
mouthful of chocolate. Nonetheless, she
books us into the campground and tells us about the various places to go on the
station. Hopes for dinner are dashed though,
as Colin the owner (who appears at this point) is hosting a bunch of his mates
at the Sunset Ridge, and that’s the culinary focus of the day. Fish and chips at the bar will have to do.
Campground. Several family groups; kids swimming in the
stream/pond behind the campground. Tired
and hot. Some flies. Some dust.
Sit. Shower. Revive.
Dinner: we wander to the bar, and immediately meet another young English
woman working at Mt. Hart. I labelled
her notAli as I never got her proper name.
Mt. Hart is kind of like El Questro’s baby cousin. It’s kind of a random and casual set up. NotAli seems to have to bartend, serve food,
bus tables, and weave around Colin’s increasingly drunk friends when they come
to raid their personal alcohol supplies.
We chat with her quite a bit; she seems to appreciate it. Fish and chips are good. We give her the rest of our chocolate and
tell her to share with Ali (she does; clearly a morale boost for both of
them). I do wonder what life path leads
from England to Mt. Hart. I understand
the ease of working overseas if you belong to the Commonwealth, and I remember
being young and adventurous (admittedly, I am still the latter) but still, the remote
Kimberley? It’s not easy to get here.
Sunday June 16 – Morning runabout:
 |
| Mt Hart, and Mt. Hart Int'l Airport behind me |
A bit of driving to do today, first we
explore a couple of locations on the Mt. Hart property. Dolerite Gorge immediately got my attention
when Ali described it. Dolerite is an
intrusive igneous rock that usually squirts into vertical and horizontal
fissures. Large swarms of dolerite dikes
(vertical) are indicative of a continent beginning to crack apart. I’d seen a few big ridges driving in that
were clearly big flat dikes; my geology reading says these are called the Hart
Dolerite, and yup, they are part of a massive regional swarm. Dolerite Gorge is a chance to look at these closely. A desultory scramble up gorge. We are still
tired, and while it’s pretty, it’s not awesome.
Maybe this is just cumulative fatigue, you can decide:
Annie Creek, down the track a few
kms, features a large boab in the embrace of a strangler fig:
It’s hot and not quite worth the
walk to see it. There are flies. Time to drive, after coffee at Mt. Hart Station. They have interesting signs on the shower block:
Back to the Gibb. Goal today is Windjana Gorge National
Park. West. With music and the occasional caravan to
pass, I stay focused. We drop out of the
quartzite into a lower, more rounded terrain – the granitic and metamorphic core
of the collisional tectonics event that conclusively sutured the Kimberley region
with Western Australia around 1.8 billion years ago. I did read a lot on geology before I came,
but there were such an abundance of confusing and unknown names and places
(such as the Dead Bullock Formation and the Ding Dong Downs Volcanics), that I couldn’t
keep it all straight. So I’ve been
faking it as I go along, just for a change.
It’s warmer. There are fewer flies.
Eventually, a distinct barrier
looms ahead: the Napier Range. The
Proterozoic is now behind us; the Napier Range is a series of
limestone units that formed a reef complex in the Devonian Period. It was something on the scale of today’s
Great Barrier Reef; the other end of it is on the east side of the Kimberley,
though in between it extends in a great upside-down U shape well off the north
coast. If you say “Devonian Reef Complex”
to any sedimentary geologist (my training), they will immediately think of
these rocks.
The Gibb shoots Yammera Gap, a
cleft in the range; steep cliffs.
Limestone doesn’t erode easily in arid climates, so the term “ramparts”
comes easily to mind. The Napier Range was
covered by a continental ice sheet in the late Paleozoic, during the last
robust Icehouse Earth (we are in the warm part of an Icehouse at present). Evidence suggests that this Yammera Gap,
Windjana Gorge and other declivities in the Napiers formed as subglacial melt
channels under the ice. The evidence
would be cool to see (ha ha) but it’s somewhere we are not going.
The road gets flatter and
straighter, the flora more monotonous. A
little hard not to zone out. A turn
south into Windjana Gorge National Park.
There are caravans. Arrive, use
all of our remaining cash to buy a camping permit. The non-generator campground is – chockablock
as expected. We find a tolerable space
with a little room around. Paul sets up
his Cal Bears flag; it seems to keep Australians away. Sure feels like we drove more than 160 kms
today. More time to zone out in the
shade. Every new caravan arrival makes
me a bit anxious – will someone crowd in next to us? This does not happen.
Around sunset, many people walk
towards the gorge. We speculate:
bats? There are plenty of inactive caves
in the Napiers; I can see several from the safety of my lounge chair. Sure enough, at dusk we start seeing large
flying foxes and some kind of smaller bat (there are a dozen plus species in
the area). It might have been nice to
see them fly out of the gorge, but it would have required walking.
Sleep. It is not quiet, but there is something oddly
musical about hearing the simultaneous murmurs of a bunch of
conversations. It becomes a susurration
as I get sleepy and pass out. A few
images from when I wake up later (someone is in deep trouble for not being able
to find something, and as they thrash about with lights trying to find it, we
all hear about it):
Monday June 17 – Early breakfast, pack up, and time to hike
Windjana Gorge. We get out early while
the light is good, and the people are scarce.
Windjana is probably 350-400 meters wide at minimum and is hemmed by
limestone cliffs 300 meters high.
Respectable:
The Lennard River drains
through it, although at present, in the dry season, it’s the Lennard Series of
Pools. Acre-scale sand bars between the
pools. The trail (Class 4, 7 km)
terraces along the river bank where the vegetation is thick. There are sandy stretches, maybe that’s why
it’s a Class 4.
There is wildlife. Freshwater crocodiles inhabit most of the
pools. Park signages says they are not
aggressive unless provoked. It then
shows Darwin Award pictures of crocodile bites.
The freshies aren’t huge, maybe 2m at most. We watch them from a distance. There are many:
Further on Paul smells another lifeform:
flying foxes, which roost in the trees in the Gorge during the day. Acrid.
They chitter as well, not a sound I’d like to camp near.
We trudge on. The Gorge is scenic:
My goal is “the classic face”
which is a genuinely world class cross sectional exposure of the reef complex. I’ve seen it in my textbooks and journal
articles since I was a baby geologist. I
have to walk on the sand to look at the Gorge walls. If I’m careful, I don’t break through the salt
crust and can progress quickly. A turn,
and there’s the face:
To the right, the flat lying rocks
are the reef deposits per se – the skeletons of a variety of marine invertebrates,
in this iteration stromatoroids, hex corals, and a variety of weird filter feeders. Also protofish with armored heads (I guess
this was a good idea at the time). To left,
the deposits slope downward – this is the ancient reef front, where wave action
broke off chunks of the reef and they tumble downhill and were lithified. Pretty cool, eh?
I sit and admire the exposure. Reefs aren’t my thing, but a good outcrop is
a good outcrop. The rocks I’ve worked on
are a factor of five older than this stuff; they formed well before life had
gotten out of the unicellular stage or even thought about creating reefs. For further perspective, since reefs appear
in Earth’s history about 500-600 million years ago, their constructing
organisms, mostly corals, have gone extinct 4-5 times (depending who’s counting). They have re-evolved after each extinction. Life persists.
Return to the truck, and further
west. The Gibb gets even flatter and straighter. It’s our last night out. Where to stop? No desire to go all the way to Broome; that
much resort and some many clean people would be painful.
Birdwood Downs appeals. I came across this in my marvelous camping
app; it seems about the right place, 20 kms or so outside of Derby. We stop and inquire about camping. Hans, the manager, is happy to accommodate us,
but wants cash – of which we now have none.
So we go to Derby. It has an ANZ bank with an ATM. It has lovely people at the Tourist
Centre. It has a lovely pier where we can have
lunch.
Hans is happy to take some of my
cash. We pick a site in the almost empty
campground. The project for the
remainder of the day is to sort out our gear, clean the truck a bit, and generally
get prepped to fly to Perth tomorrow.
All this requires getting quite dusty, so showers are a final
stage. Complete, then dinner and sleep.
Tuesday June 18 Final walkabout.
The panorama below shows moonset on the left and sunrise on the
right.
The full moon has been bright
enough for reading, as usual. I have
been wearing a sleep mask for the past week.
Birdwood Downs is pretty:
Packed, we depart.
At the T-junction (Derby right, Broome left)
the Gibb River Road is DONE. Paul let me drive all of it, which I mostly loved.
223
kilometers later, Broome.
Broome is an old town (fishing,
pearling) and was actually bombed in World War II. It began development as a resort around when I
first came to West Australia in 1985. Early
in the work we often said, let’s blow this stuff off and go to Broome. Now, it’s several quaint blocks of shops and
many outlying holiday apartment complexes.
I assume there is upscale accommodation too. Probably more people than the total population
of the Kimberley. But it has an airport,
and a Britz rental depot.
Lunch, other tasks, a sit at Cable Beach. I do take a gander at the water:
It's really this color.
Good bye to the truck. Paul does a masterful job laying out all the
problems with the vehicle, or rather, the Britz-equipped parts of it. The depot dude totally gets it; it really
seems that the Darwin depot did a crap job getting it ready for us. All well, though.
Broome International Airport (direct
flights to Indonesia). Eventually, 2
hours and 45 minutes to Perth. Our dusty
luggage arrives. We uber, tripping hard at
how easy it is to recognize landmarks (Paul live here for a while) amid all the
changes. Drop Paul at his hotel, where his
partner Vivian is already checked in. On
to my Airbnb in West Perth. Sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment