Entry By : Eric and Valerie
Country: Australia
Subject:

Kalbarri Gorge

Date: March 12 , 2006

Today we left Kalbarri very early in order to spend as much time sightseeing along the way to Denham. It's a long drive and we broke it up into several segments along the way.

It was a cool morning and thank goodness for that! Our first stop was the Kalbarri Gorge on the Murchison River. A cyclone (southern hemisphere speak for hurricane) came through this region about two weeks ago and dumped several feet of water over the outback. It's not as dry as everyone thinks, but water evaporates or runs out of the area almost as fast as it rains.

Since the majority of the water came down much further inland and north of where we were, the river was just getting ready to crest and it was very impressive. As you can see from the photos, it is very muddy and moving pretty quickly. Later in the year, this will be a clear blue stream that flows through this gorge at a pace that allows swimming in it.

We hiked all the way down into the gorge and back up again. As I said, we were glad it was a cool morning! Notice the flynets on peoples faces. It's unbelievable that there can be sooooo many of them!

After hiking the gorge, we went to another spot to see 'Nature's Window'. This is a ridge that has a window cut into it from millions of years of wind erosion. Most impressive, and it makes a great photo spot. Afterwards we did a little rock climbing:)

All in all, it was a great spot to visit. We then jumped back on the bus for an incredibly long drive to Denham. Along the way we stopped at a place called Hamelin Pool to see some stromatolites. These are microscopic organisms that form colonies and look like coral growths, except these live in very limited areas on the earth and are thought to be responsible for creating the oxygen that we breath. Unlike trees which convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, these organisms give off oxygen as a by-product when they feed on microscopic organisms in the water. They can only survive in shallow water with a very high salt content. This is why the location we saw them was ideal. It's at the south end of a long bay which has very little tidal influence so the water stays very salty, and warmer than typical ocean temperatures. I did take some photos, but they just look like rocks, so they're not really very interesting to look at:) These colonies are thought to be 1900 million years old! We were there at low tide so much of it was exposed. The areas that were still underwater were interesting in that you could see bubbles coming out of them and breaking at the surface. This was pure oxygen coming out!

From there we made one more stop before coming into Denham. There is a spot called eagle bluff that looks down from a cliff to the water. The reef is very shallow and we could see forms in the water swimming. These included several very large turtles, sharks, and a dugong (manatee). I'm hoping to see more of these guys up close and personal in a few days when we arrive in Coral Bay and I throw on my scuba gear again.

Stay tuned,

Eric & Val

 

 

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