A quick (6 hour) side trip inland to Tom Price

I’ve lost count of how many people said that I “just had” to go to Karijini National Park, so even though it was quite the side-trip, it duly made it on to the list.

Karijini is a National Park near the town of Tom Price, a mining town in the iron-ore rich Pilbara. Everything is very red, very dusty and very dry, but with the help of our latest audiobook (Silverthorn, the second in the Rift War Saga by Raymond Fiest) we made it through the quite boring drive to our free camp at Tiger Eye Pool, just outside Tom Price.

It’s been a while since we’ve had the opportunity to free camp, and this spot really did tick all the boxes. We had a nice spot on top of a little hill looking over the mountain ranges (the Kiwi in me can only call them hills, as they’re only about 1000 metres high). There was the odd other camper there, generally arriving late afternoon and leaving in the morning and always at least a few hundred metres away from us.

Anyway, back to the national park. As usual, the dog created a handbrake. My tactic this time had been to join a local Facebook group where we could post asking for help with dog sitting. That garnered two responses – one from a lovely lady who could do one week day, and another from a lady who could help us out on the weekend. We locked both those in before disaster struck – the dog hurt his leg and was hobbling around on three legs – not really great to drop him off at the dog-sitters in that state. So instead of the national park we first went to see the vet (or vet nurse as it turns out, the vet shares his time with the nearby mining town of Newman). She gave him a painkiller injection and an appointment for the next day.

So instead of all of us going out to the National Park, I took the kids while Jim did the dog-minding. We chose the furthest spot from home (a 1.5 hour drive), where we did a loop walk through Dales Gorge, out to Fortescue Falls where we had some lunch and a swim, then on to Fern Pool and back again. The water was very clear, but very, very cold. That didn’t seem to bother Hamish and he was swimming around like a little fish. Heidi got in there eventually, and I managed the bottom half before I decided I could do without the ice bath.

With the 3hr round trip and the late start, that was about all we could fit into the day, but it was a good introduction to the park.

Luckily the dog had made a pretty miraculous recovery but we took him to the vet the next day just in case. Even more miraculously, the vet didn’t charge us for that appointment. We should have bought a lotto ticket to see if we could get that third miracle. After that appointment, Jim had his turn, this time taking the kids out to Hammersley Gorge for another, very cold, swim.

So given his recovery, we kept our appointment with the second dog sitter, who not only was offering her services for free, but happily upped her commitment to both days on the weekend which allowed us to book in for a tour of the local Rio Tinto iron ore mine as well.

It also meant we could get a solid day of work and school in at camp before being able to spend the weekend having fun. On Saturday we dropped the dog off. The lady looking after him has three dogs of her own, all of various shapes and sizes, and five cats, all of which scattered in each direction when we arrived. Jett immediately made himself at home by eating one of the dog’s breakfasts. We just managed to stop him from eating the other two.

Back out to the park, and this time we decided to tackle Weano Gorge and Handrail Pool. Handrail Pool is amazing. You walk through a gorge that gets narrower and narrower, until it is almost just a body-width wide, then appears this fantastic pool, which you can only get to by climbing down a short rock face while holding on to the handrail (which I assume accounts for its inventive name). Jim and Hamish did swim here, but there was no way I was going to brave that cold water, and Heidi was firmly with me on that too. We had lunch there, then walked out and made short drive over to Joffre Falls.

The falls weren’t running at Joffre, but there was a decent amount of water in the pool at the bottom so we walked down into it for another swim. This time, as the pool was in the sun, the water was a little warmer so we all got in, and walked/swam further down to the next bit (again down a very narrow little passage). I would have really liked to have explored further through that second bit, but without a wetsuit I think I would have struggled. The signs around warning of hyperthermia were starting to make sense…

It’s quite amazing just how many gorges there are in this national park, and they are all very different to each other. Even though we missed a day due to the dog dramas, I feel like we had a good look at the place, and the recommendations that we had received were definitely on the money.

As for Tom Price the town, I actually quite liked it, and for a mining town, I don’t think Jim minded it either. Clearly Rio drops a bit of money in the town as their sporting facilities were top notch (AFL field, swimming pool, baseball diamond, soccer pitches, tennis courts to name but a few). We also managed to go to our second drive-in movie of the trip, this time to see the Barbie movie, which Jim and I quite enjoyed. I think most of it went over the kid’s heads, but they were quite distracted by all the other kids around too. The town is packed full of young families and clearly has a really nice community feel to it. The only real drawback to it is that it is really, really far away from other places.

Finally for our last day we joined a tour of the Rio Tinto mine. This iron ore mine is massive, and everything they were doing there was on a big scale. Even the trains taking the ore out are the largest robots in the world (driverless trains). Interestingly, they had an information board talking about some of their other operations around the world and the Diavik Diamond mine (up near the Arctic Circle in Canada) got a mention. I’m sure there aren’t many non-mining people who can say they’ve been to both the Tom Price mine and the Diavik Diamond mine (but I can!).

But after six nights in our lovely free camp it was time to pack up and move on. We had to do a pretty comprehensive pack up the night before we left as the drive out of there to Exmouth was even longer (seven hours), but we seem to wake up early anyway so that’s no real problem.  We’ve really enjoyed our time in the Pilbara, even though we, and everything we own is now covered in red dirt.

P.S. Who is Tom Price I hear you ask? He was the vice-president of Kaiser Steel, and the driving force pushing for mining to commence in the Pilbara. He managed to get it all underway, but sadly died just a matter of hours after confirmation of the iron-ore deposits in the region were received.