Karijini National Park - one of the jewels in WA's crown

Karijini NP is Western Australia's second largest NP (first place goes to the former Rudall River NP now Karlamilyi NP) encompassing some 627, 441 hectares.  But much of the southern half of the park is inaccessible.  Visitors concentrate on the rugged, spectacular gorges in the north with rock pools, waterfalls and precipitous rock faces.  There are lookouts and walking trails and the trails are graded in degrees from 2-5 classes of difficulty.

Oxer Lookout provided breathtaking views over Hancock Gorge.

We walked together part of the way into Weano Gorge which is one degree of difficulty less than Hancock Gorge but the part where the water was too high to walk through safely for me stopped us going all the way and reaching Handrail Pool.

We enjoyed walking along Weano Gorge and the views of the banded iron rock formations that tower above one down in the narrow valley where you are walking.

The next lookout was over Joffre Gorge which is a very narrow gorge with water at the bottom which almost all the gorges have.  It is a very steep descent to the bottom and when we sat the gorge we both realised that when we were here ten years ago I stopped halfway down and sat on the ledge while Andrew descended to the bottom.

Hancock Gorge was one that Andrew did on his own while I stayed on the rim.  This gorge provides the highest degree of difficulty and Andrew did the walk down to the gorge on his own leaving me at the top.  A young woman tripped at the end of the gorge and broke her angle and was apparently screaming in agony with the pain.  She was taken out on a stretcher but not until the late afternoon whereas the accident happened mid morning.

Kermit's Pool at the end of the gorge.

This is where Andrew and some others were helping the woman with the broken ankle.








We spent all morning at the NP and drove out in the afternoon to stay overnight out of the park.  We can't camp overnight as we have the dog.  As it was, Maxi had to be locked in for the duration while we explored and half a day was as much as we could expect a dog to be confined even with the windows open.

Unfortunately we were not able to go to two other favourite spots in the Pilbara - Hamersley Gorge and Millstream NP as the road to both are unpaved. Winnie, our motor home can only cope with a fairly limited amount of corrugated, gravel roads. The drive to the three gorges on the north/west side of Karjini NP involved 13 kms of gravel which was as much as we felt we were able to do.  Poor Winnie was shaken about a lot and the trip took 3/4 hour each way.  But the three spectacular gorges, Weano, Hancock and Joffre were well worth the rough ride.