Being skool hols, we knew it might be busy, but even though Dales camp was booked to the hilt, we were pleasantly surprised at how spacious it felt as it’s been well laid out so that you weren’t on top of one another. Up and breakfasted, the moment we’d been waiting for with an ounce of dread, basically letting the cat out of the bag to the kids that the entire purpose of Karijini was to go WAAAALKING..!! Now the litmus test for their motivational jigsaw puzzle! Fortunately, with Jen, Jacob, Larry & Julie joining us, it helped to ease us into the daily routine of gorge walks. First up, Dales Gorge. You start at the top looking down into Circular pool, then follow an easy, fun path down to the valley floor for a closer inspection. We then opted to do the valley floor walk all the way to Fortescue Falls. I’m not sure if it was the kids or Larry that devised a game, basically to touch each of the path markers and shout “tip”, collecting thousands of points for each marker.!

Nevertheless, the walk ended up being a breeze, regardless of the fact once more we hadn’t packed any lunch – when will we learn?? Fortescue Falls was an impressive sight on arrival, but none of us braved the chilly looking pool beneath on the promise that just further along the gorge was the warmer Fern Pool. Every degree counts in my book, but even when we got to Fern the reaction from those a step ahead of us plunging in, didn’t fill me with confidence that this was going to be a pleasant dip! Something about having kids, means you must do things you wouldn’t typically consider, so there was me, toes over the edge, psyching myself up for the leap. One, two, three… arrrrggh! That was ‘refreshing’!!!

Rumour has it that the water coming over the falls is that tad bit warmer still, so with little fella clinging to my back, across we swam. Now I’d underestimated how tricky swimming in cold water that takes your breath away can be, especially when you have a limpet climbing up your back and pushing you down, so your lungs are deeper than normal and every breath takes a tremendous effort. Narrowly avoiding an embarrassing drowning incident, I reached the other side and it did actually feel half a degree warmer… or was that just the relief of getting across alive? To be fair its pretty cool (no pun intended) sitting beneath a waterfall in these magnificent natural surrounds. Refreshed we clambered up the track out of the gorge and followed the track back to the car. One gorge down, no complaints from the tinlids & a jigsaw piece earnt. Perhaps we were on to a winner!

Day 2, Kalamina Gorge. A late start as the kids first had school with our supply teacher Julie. This is another beautiful gorge, that we had pretty much to ourselves. You walk down to the gorge floor then along until you reach a pool and an arch, pause to admire the serenity, then retrace your steps back out. What I found stunning here were the amazing reflections in the mirror glass pools giving near perfect symmetry between the rock face and its reflected twin. That was until we started a stone skimming competition and it was game on to see who would be champ. I’m pretty sure mine was the winner, but the judge chose that particular moment to look away, darn! The kids got another puzzle piece and with all this walking crashed early to bed – winning!

So far this was going far better than expected, perhaps we should start marketing this technique, other families make coin on the road fire juggling or as musicians, this could help a whole new dimension of travelling families – hmmm?

Some of the walks at Karijini as just too damn fun not to enjoy. After saying farewell to our Sydney friends, Jen & Jacob heading off to fix a leaky fuel tank before tackling the Gibb, Larry & Julie to start the long trek east for home, we set off for Kermit’s Pool. Although a short walk boy it’s a lot of fun. Its not long before you run out of track and you have to get wet or go home. A seemingly shallow pool soon has you waist deep, inch by inch as the water takes your breath away and you emerge at an amphitheatre where people huddle to bask on the rocks that have been heated by the precious few rays of sun that find their way down into the depths.

You then enter the SPIDER walk… a narrow chasm with the stream trickling around your ankles and its fun to try and keep your feet dry by being a spider stretched across the gap, feet one side, hands the other. Once negotiated you arrive at Kermit’s pool and splashdown. Now this one is cooollld / freezing… but super dad was the first one in… what a hero! Now the others had to follow. Heaps of fun and a must do.

Another day, another gorge. Weano is a lovely amble, first along the top, then back along the gorge floor till you get to another highlight, Handrail Pool. A similar narrow chasm has you marvelling at the way the water has cut its way through the rock like a knife, until it pops out into a huge circular pool which you admire from the top of the little water fall cascading from the chasm you’ve just negotiated. As the name suggests, to continue you clamber down a handrail set in the rock till you reach the lip of the pool. Listening to others it used to just be a bit of old rope until the fun police instigated OH&S and installed the handrail. Joking aside, we also hear that Karijini has the busiest SES in the whole of WA due to dumb tourists hurting themselves, but can you really prevent Darwin’s Law?

Admiring the beauty of the place, I thought we’d chill then return whence we came. Not so, turns out you can actually continue through the pool and onwards – a GRADE 6 scramble no less… but again the only way was getting wet and trust me this pool was deeper and colder still! Reo had literally climbed up on top of my head and wasn’t coming down! You are however rewarded by a magnificent view of layered rock and water continuing still further past the rope declaring you’d reached the official end of the trail. Back to Handrail Pool and much to Lexi’s (our drone police) horror, someone had launched a drone! “Don’t they KNOW this is a National Park”, boy did she give them the evil eye. Just to ensure Lexi felt her thoughts validated, mummy piped up, “yes! Who would think about doing such a thing in a national park.”

Day whatever and another gorge… Knox this time. We’d been surprised how few people were doing the less publicised gorges, but to us each had their own magic and subtly different from one another. This was a good scramble down loose rock to the gorge floor. It was slippery going but fun nevertheless. The walk is again breath taking. This is iron ore country and the colours and sculptures left by the water were just incredible. The camera never does justice. We shinnied past an obvious swimming hole, but pressed on to the end of the trail, where another beaut of a spot, with water flowing over a rock feature into a plunge pool, had Reo mesmerised. Fortunately, with digital you can delete the footage of numerous false attempts as Reo tried time and again to pluck up the courage to slide down the rock into the water. Eventually he made it and was out just as fast with the water being a mere 13C!

The end of the trail was a crack leading to the gorge beyond, barely wide enough to squeeze through, the rocks towering above us on either side with the sun at the right angle to cause them to glow orange. Fascinating, given the gorge behind us that we’d just come down would have been big enough to walk at least a dozen elephants abreast! On the way back, we got lured by the swimming hole we passed earlier. In for a penny in for a pound. Yup this was cold, cold enough to stop your heart momentarily as you plunged into the depths. At least that’s bath time sorted for another day!

With the kid’s jigsaw puzzle rapidly taking shape but with our days at Dales camp drawing to an end, we only had the opportunity to do a drive by visit to Joffre Gorge, the last of the gorges in this part of the National Park. As we peered over the lookout, down into another magnificent and again different gorge, who should pipe up that they wanted to walk down to the bottom, none other than REO… knock me down with a feather…! Well that settled it, with enthusiasm like that we were coming back to do the walk, we had to! Working a plan on the fly isn’t difficult for us, it’s pretty much how we roll day by day, we just had to fit it around a tour of the Tom Price mine and available camping. For now we had to head to Tom Price to do some restocking, catch the afternoon tour and find a camp for the night.

Alas the tour was cancelled due to an active incident in one of the mines, but seeing we were in iron ore country and iron ore makes the economy go round and it was a perfect  school excursion, we decided to reschedule for the next available tour. That left finding camp for the night. We’d had a recommendation from @littleaussieadventures to try the free camp about 10mins out of town and it didn’t disappoint. Way back off the road and across a dry river bed we had a perfect camp all to ourselves, with a great view of the mountainous skyline. Fire wood collected we settled down to watch a cracker of a sunset, whilst realising it was 10^th July and today was our 15^th Wedding Anniversary!! We’d kinda both forgot… days just blur on the road. 15 years married and 10 years together before tying the knot. To ‘celebrate’ we had some defrosted left over chilli, which the kids delighted in serving up for us with pomp and ceremony on this special day… we did however have toasted marshmallows for pud, so not all bad, and boy that view was tops!

Mine tour day and the kids were keen to see the big yellow trucks. We were herded onto a bus at the visitors centre and driven up to the mine site, but unfortunately it was somewhat of a quiet day on site and consequentially the tour was a little underwhelming. We did see the massive yellow Tonka trucks and learnt that they favour female drivers as they get more life out of the multi-million dollar skip on wheels than they used to with boy-racers hooning about. For Reo however, the most exciting part was seeing the semi-automated lawn movers all about the place… aka COWS! At the end of the tour, back at the visitors centre as we handed in our PPE (i.e. hard hat n safety glasses), I noticed in the chuck-out bin one could, for a mere gold coin donation to the Royal Flying Doctors Service, be the proud owner of your very own Rio Tinto hard helmet (they’d something or other broken on them) Reo just couldn’t believe it, “for real, my own helmet?” Given it’d also just been pocket money day and $2 was already burning a hole in his pocket, with trembling hands he dropped his gold coin into the RFDS collection tin and held aloft his new acquisition as if he was about to become king! As he proudly walked back out onto the street to show mummy, sporting his new bonnet, all she could say was “where the b@#$%y h31L are we going to keep that?”

After another evening back out our cracking free camp and another roaring fire, we were up early, well earlyish, it’s all relative, to shoot into Tom Price to do a last top up of water & fuel before returning to Joffre Gorge. The kids were raring to go and a power banana at the look-out had them claim this one looked easy. So off we hiked all the way down to the bottom. Truth be told we’d been told by others that it was a precarious climb with sheer walls and long drops, but it just turned out to be a pretty good scramble down a well beaten path and our mountain goats aced it. Down at the amphitheatre it was an impressive sight looking up at the small waterfall whilst imagining what it must look like in full force during the wet. We were all glad we did all the walks and the kids were getting used to carrying their water backpack, one would carry it down (full) the other on the way up (empty). We were sooo sooo glad they had such fun on these walks. Joffre was a grade 5, nay bother.

We’d planned to exit Karijini via the Rio Tinto access road, which left around the other side of the park near to Hamersley Gorge. We’d done this road 13 years back and well, we just drove along it not seeing another car all day. Now it is a popular short-cut and important to get a permit from the visitor centre after sitting through a 20min video all about safe driving on dirt. You probably needed similar when we last drove it but we were more oblivious back then… oops! So free camp for the night was just outside the park, within a stones through of Hamersley so we could get there early and beat the crowds. Up n out being our motto it was early to bed.

Incredibly we were the first car in the carpark. Ok well we hadn’t had brekkie yet, we’d literally just woke up, pulled the lid down on Minty, jumped into Tinfish and driven to Hamersley. Did I mention the kids were still left in Minty! How excited were they!! As we munched on brekkie the cars started arriving, so we up’d our pace and hot footed it down into the gorge. The highlight of this gem is the beautiful Spa pool at the top of the walk, sculptured by the waterfall cascading down the rocks. As was now the norm, it was time to take the plunge. What a welcome surprise, the water actually felt warmer than all previous dips and you could actually stay in without losing feeling and turning blue! Time disappeared as we alternated lounging on the hot rocks like lizards and taking a refreshing dip. Knowing we still had some hours of driving ahead of us come lunch time, we bade a fond farewell to Karijini and all her gorgeous gorges, definitely a highlight of the adventure so far.

It is the journey, not the destination and this is certainly the case with the Rio Tinto access road, now a busy thorough fair of worker and tourists alike. This road follows the path of the Rio Tinto Iron Ore Railway, part of the largest private rail network in the world, moving ore from the mine to the port. Now everyone likes a train but nothing beats watching a train pass for a FULL 5 mins… 2.5km long, consisting of 236 ore cars with a total capacity of 28,000t per train… now that’s a train. Reo wore his new hard hat with pride, saluting his trains as they trundled pass. Most now are autonomous as back in the day train drivers commanded a healthy $240k pay packet! Rio Tinto, translates as River Red and this certainly appears to be the case as train after train transports ore to the port and off to help China grow.

At the end of the track for us was Millstream Chichester National Park where we decided to spend a few days riding out some of the skool hols. We didn’t really do much whilst in Millstream, preferring to laze around camp, but the kids did get to watch Harry Potter #2 which they were mega excited about. We’d been listening to the Audio books in the car… these are a god send for any extended road trip. We are very strict on iPad time as they aren’t generally allowed in the car with kids goggling at the screen and quickly getting obsessive like an addict with behaviour subsequently plummeting, so we listed to audio books instead and they are a hit. Since being on the road 7 months this was only the 3^rd movie we’d watched together as a family as we were keen to share the Harry Potter experience with them. In preparation they’d sketched some of the main new characters as imagining them whilst listening to the story which is completely over ridden once seen on the big screen.

We did venture out to check out the historic homestead, do the snappy gums drive and go to the look-out. This place is something of an oasis in an otherwise barren landscape, with its permanent waterholes along the path of the Fortescue River. According to Aboriginal learnings, the waterholes are due to a serpent or Warlu who came inland looking to swallow up two boys who had eaten a forbidden parrot, leaving this valley and the permanent waterholes in its wake.  I could definitely see Reo embracing these learnings as he always has an alternative view on what makes things tick!

Leaving Millstream we took the track out to Python Pools, another pool of water amongst the barren Pilbarra rocks. This twisty turny road suddenly comes to the edge of the plateau which you never realised you were driving on and you admire a vast vista with various rocky outcrops protruding from the valley floor, which could easily have been a setting for any spaghetti western. Driving down into the valley, flashes of red catch your eye in little dry creeks and you soon realise there are hundreds of flowering Sturt’s Desert Pea, a most beautiful flower and a stark contrast to the dry dusty landscape. The walk into Python Pools is a short amble before you come to the base of a sheer cliff with an algae green pool that never dries. Whilst an impressive sight, the water wasn’t tempting any off us in for a dip so we had a bit of fun flying the drone until the local crows took a dislike and started aggressively swooping at it. Maz hurriedly landed it safe n sound with some good footage of the pool to boot.

Leaving the Pilbarra we had had a great few weeks. We’d met some old friends, walked, hiked, ambled and swam in the gorges, gazed in wonder at the stars, saw the back bone of the Australian economy, learnt some of the dreamtime stories and best of all the kids had both earnt their Karijini Junior Rangers badge. Oh and did I mention they only went and COMPLETED THEIR JIGSAW PUZZLE… 7 walks through all the gorges from class 4 strolls to class 6 rock clambering and NOT A SINGLE COMPLAINT from either of them… new ‘Farm Boots’ (as Reo calls them) coming right up. Super proud of them both!