DAY 33 – IRON ORE AND THE NATIONAL PARK

The pictures are of one of the gorges in Karijini National Park which we visited this afternoon. We have only seen part of it so far but it is certainly remote, spectacular and worthy of its reputation. The walk down into the gorges and the climb back out is very demanding physically.

First thing this morning, we joined 29 other people in a coach for a tour of the Rio Tinto iron ore mine. The scale of operation is difficult to grasp. The amount of ore excavated and crushed and taken by 220 carriage trains to Dampier for export each day is staggering.

There used to be a Mount Tom Price but the mine is where it used to be. It has been excavated, crushed and exported to China so it no longer exists.

The picture shows the size of the ore truck when you compare it to the man walking behind it. 

After the tour, we drove to the top of Mount Nameless. It’s the highest mountain in Western Australia that you can drive to the top of and provides spectacular views of the surrounding country side including the mine. While the mine is significant, it is only a very small part of a very large landscape when seen from the top of the mountain.

Our van site here in Tom price is idyllically quiet, strange as that may seem. We are in the sparsely populated and nicely treed tourist section. The workers don’t fare so well.

Tomorrow we are moving to the Dales Gorge camping area in another part of the national park. We anticipate spending one night there before heading north to Port Hedland and then on to Broome. I expect that there won’t be any phone reception in the national park so there may not be a blog tomorrow night.

Sunday is our 40^th wedding anniversary so we will have to do something special. That might be difficult if we are in the middle of nowhere between Broome and Kununurra but who knows what Sunday might bring.