Northern Bungles

The weather to date has been nice warm days followed by cooler evenings which has been very easy to take. This morning that fell apart. It was damn cold. So far we have been reasonably close to the coast but Purnululu National Park is well inland and so it was a lot colder.

After breakfast we went to the local airport for our second helicopter ride of the trip. We were flying a Robertson 44 chopper around the Bungle Bungle Ranges. It was fantastic to see the domes from the air, it really gave an appreciation of just how many there are and how amazing this landscape is. See the photos below.

After our chopper ride we headed up to the northern end of the park to see Echidna Chasm. This is a narrow crack that runs through the Bungle Bungle Massif.

The rock here is very different to the southern end of the range with the rocks in the northern area containing large rounded river rocks whereas the southern end has smaller pebble sized rocks, once again likely due to currents in the ancient sea.

Echidna Chasm starts with a wide crack in the rock and gets progressively narrower as you walk through. Of course it was all carved out by rainwater over millions of years. The walk in was pretty easy, as with other areas of the park you walk up through the dry river beds to minimise the impact to the banks. As you move through the chasm the walls become progressively closer until you can reach out and touch both sides of the chasm.

The chasm is open all the way to the top which would be about 100m or so and the light coming down made the whole chasm glow orange.

After wandering around for a while we hopped back on the bus and headed to our stop for the night at the Halls Creek Motel in Halls Creek - the location of the first gold discovery in WA.

On arriving we cruised out to the site of the original town but there was not a lot left. They moved the town a number of years ago to be closer to the water bore. While Charlie Hall did find gold there was never a lot of gold at Halls Creek so the gold rush was short lived and quickly petered out.

On the way back to town we stopped off at the China Walls. This is a quartz rock ridge that has been left standing after the surrounding sedimentary rock has weathered away, quite amazing actually.

So far this holiday I have mostly photographed rocks and sunsets and today wasn’t any different.

Tomorrow we are off to Fitzroy Crossing.Read more