Ali Dobson

Tuesday 9th October, Leaving the track at Norseman, we travelled to Le Grande National Park, hoping to camp at Lucky Bay, but settling in at Le Grande Beach camp site instead. It was incredibly windy, winds up to 30 knots with the camp volunteers telling us it’s the worst they had seen.
We had to tie the tent to the car and cook inside the tent. The tent at times bent sideways, falling on our heads. Went to boil the billy for a cup of tea, using the last of the gas in the cylinder. This meant we had to go back into Esperance the following day to swap the cylinder and we “umm’d” and “ahh’d” about packing up and heading back into Norseman to camp again at the old town or whether we stay another day to explore Le Grande National Park.

Wednesday 10th October 2018
Decided to stay another day to explore Le Grande. Went into Esperance first thing, changed the gas cylinder over and did some washing, getting two coffees in the process.
Explored Le Grande for the remainder the day, visiting,
• Frenchman’s Peak, solid granite that extends thousands of meters below the ground. 12,,000 million years ago this granite was born as a huge mass of molten rock deep within the earth’s crust where it cooled slowly and solidified into large crystals, mostly quartz and feldspar. Over eons that followed, rain, rivers and glaciers gradually wore away covering material to reveal giant domes in the granite. 40 million years ago, when the sea level was at least 250 meters above its present level, waves relentlessly pounded this granite peak, slowly carving out the caves and tunnels near the summit.
• Hellfire Bay,
• Lucky Bay,
• Rossiter Bay and
• Thistle Cove.
Absolutely spectacular scenery, I’d go as far as saying the best we’ve seen to date, if not it would be up there with the best. Pristine white, squeaky sand, turquoise blue water, rocky outcrops, it had it all. Also got some great wildflowers that I hadn’t seen before.
Back at camp, it was just as blowy as it had been the previous day and we discovered that the gas cylinder we had swapped had a different fitting so we couldn’t use it to cook anything. Rustled up some cheese and salad and had that in a sandwich for dinner plus copious amounts of biscuits as that is all we had to eat that day. Put the billy on the BBQ to heat water for a cup of tea, only it wasn’t hot enough to boil the water. Most of the campers were using the camp kitchen to cook their dinner, using their own butane burners to cook their meal (BBQ not hot enough; too windy to use their gas at their own camps – a very valuable lesson learned for our next camping expedition). A very kind fellow camper boiled our billy for us so we could have a cup of tea.
Spent a miserable night in the tent with the wind whipping the tent in all directions. No real choice but to go to bed and read and go to sleep early. Neither Mick, nor I got a very good night’s sleep and were up, packing up at 5.00 am, well I was up about 5.30 am. Packed and out of there by 7.00 am.Read more