Tuesday, 8 July 2014 178.6kms
We started the morning early. While we were packing up Hendrix and Elokin decided to go and look for other kids to play with. We had a chat with a nice man from Victoria and were finally ready to leave camp at 8.55am. We found Elokin and Hendrix playing with Ruby and Samuel. Why do kids wait until the last few minutes to find friends to play with???? We stopped at the homestead to top up our water supply and had another chat with a lovely couple from Broome. We finally left Mt Hart at 9.25am.
This time we did count the dry creek crossings and there were 30! That makes 35 in total creek crossing on the 50km driveway. It is a nice drive and very scenic as the landscape changes. We arrived back at the Gibb River Road at 10.25am and turned left, heading east.
Our first stop for the morning was at Lennard Gorge. We ate a snack in the car park before trekking off. This walk is a 3km return trip over an uneven rocky ground, a mountain and across a dry creek bed. We had a few people pass us on our way saying that it was a long walk, there are lots of rocks and it’s a hard walk. We decided not to listen to them and discover it for ourselves. We are all glad we did. Yes, there are rocks, it’s not a boardwalk, it’s a bush walk, and you can’t expect it to be a smooth, paved track. The land is what it is and without pulling every rock out, it cannot be changed. A dry creek bed is going to have rocks and boulders in it that is what they are. And as for the mountain, it has nothing on the steep steps at Circular Pool in Karijini. All in all, the walk was fine. Proper footwear would be a good idea for ankle support, but the four of us wore our crocs as we forgot to put socks in the car this morning. Oops. After you walk up, across the flat top and then down the other side of the mountain you arrive at a lookout. Now, the sign says that this is the terminus for the walk, but the article that I had with us had said that there would be two tracks that would lead us to the bottom and the top of the falls. Now, if I hadn’t read the article and known that potentially we could get to the gorge, yes, I probably would have agreed with the other people that the walk wasn’t really worth it. But being adventurous like we are, Nath led the way and we scrambled down the cliff face to the bottom pool. It is similar to walking the gorges in Karijini really, except maybe a little bit higher up, which could explain why they try to stop people climbing around here. If you slip, it is a very long way down!
Anyway, we made it to the bottom and Nath bombied off the rocks into the water. The temperature was cool he said, but nice for a swim. No matter how much he tried to convince Elokin and Hendrix, they wouldn’t get in with him, and I opted to not wear swimmers today, thinking that there wouldn’t be somewhere decent to swim. After spending a fair amount of time down here, my tummy was starting to tell me it was lunch time, and we stupidly didn’t pack any food, thinking we wouldn’t be long. Nath was kicking himself now as he really wanted to walk to the top pool of the falls, but we needed to eat. On our way back to the car, we stopped at a small, shallower pool where Elokin and Hendrix happily went for a swim with Nath.
Back at the car, we ate a chocolate to tie us over as it was hot and there was no shade to eat lunch. We left at 1.35pm and headed to March Fly Glen, a place we had stopped twice last trip. There were a lot of people already set up for the night here, so we just ate lunch in the shade and decided that we would continue on to see what else we could find. We left there at 3pm and continued onto Imintji Store for a diesel top up, plus a jerry. This is supposed to be the cheapest fuel on the Gibb and today it was 236.5c/l. We started looking for a place to stop for the night from here. There were a couple of tracks that we turned into, only to find that they already had someone in them or they were just the quarry for the road. Before long, it was getting late and we arrived at the turnoff for Adcock Gorge. Seen as it was only 5kms off the road and supposed to be good in the afternoon light, we made the trip to check it out. What we found I would not call a gorge, either that or we went to the wrong place. It certainly felt like the longest 5kms in history, but that could just be because we were racing the sun. What we arrived at was a pool in the river with a few boulders at one end, that I guess would be the waterfall when there is water flowing and paperbark tree lined banks. It looked cool in the late afternoon light, purely because of the reflections on the water and the sun streaming through the branches. We didn’t stick around long as the sun was very low by now. We left at 4.55pm and it didn’t seem to take as long getting back out. From here we tried 2 more tracks that seemed to lead to nowhere. The first we arrived before the sunset, but I got a bad feeling about it and after we had stopped and turned the car off ready to unpack, I told Nath that I wasn’t comfortable so we left. To my advantage, it was a lumpy, spinifex ground and not very appealing. The next we arrived after the sun had set and we had our headlights on. Again, it seemed to just keep going with no particular destination, so we didn’t travel as far down this one, before deciding to turn around. The problem now was that there wasn’t a place to turn around very easily with the van on, so after bulldozing a sapling in the dark, we got around and headed back to the Gibb.
We travelled along further still looking for another track. We saw people camped just off the road, but didn’t find the track that they went in on. At this point we thought that trying to find a track in the dark was pointless and started to make our way to Manning Gorge. But as fate would have it, at the bottom of the range on the bitumen, was Galvans Gorge, which was going to be our next forge walk. There were already 3 other vehicles camped here so we stopped in the middle of the road (as we had missed the entry), backed it up and joined them. We weren’t going to pull anything out, but realised that we didn’t have enough food in the car to feed us all, and had no choice but to access the fridge and cupboards in the van.
After dinner, everything got packed back into the van as is our standard rest area procedure. Before we went to sleep we heard dingoes howling in the direction of the gorge.
Until next time…. Happy and Safe Travels.