Monday 18th August – warm fine sunny

We woke early this morning to go to the Southern end of the park and do the 10 km Whip Snake Gorge Class 4.  The days are warm and it gets hot in the valleys with all of the rock surface heating up.

 We stopped at a look out and this plant was growing as a large shrub.  It was absolutely totally covered in the most vicious thorns.

  

 

 

 

 

The southern part of the park is very different to the northern end.

All of the car parks have shade sail covers over numerous picnic tables.  There are plenty of toilets.

This is Piccaninny car park.

The soil type is also different, there is a lot of sandstone, very little conglomerate and there is a lot of very fine sand.  The rocks are loose and vary in size from large down to sand granules.

This was the only exposed full layer of pebbles that we saw, mostly there were small seams.

The sandstone is not typical sandstone (it is called “glasshill sandstone”) and is only held together by each sand grain where by other sandstone is bound with other materials.  This is the reason that it has been easily shaped by water.  There were lots of “bowls” formed by rocks swirling around in the sandstone.

 

Another type of skink living in the rocks who posed for us.  A very healthy and well fed one at that.

 

 

 

Most of the walk is out in the open and only a small part is the entry into the gorge.

Even though we started early it was lunch time when we got back and it was quite hot on the rocks.

This is a side track and is called “The Window”, it is a 6 km return walk, so we included within our trek for a couple of metres more.

I’m trying to get the hang of the panorama function on the camera.

This is a White-quilled Rock Pigeon 28-30cm.  It has large white flashes about three quarters along it’s wings in flight.  I saw the large white flash and didn’t know what it was.  It has such a tiny head and very short legs for the body.  They are only found in a very small area in the Kimberley.

 

 

Whip Snake Gorge was good, it was a short walk in after a long trek up with valley.  There was a little water there, but we saw all of the birds in a water hole out of the gorge.  We didn’t see any wildlife in the gorge, only dead frogs or cane toads – hard to see what they were.  Apparently cane toads have made it this far.

We are only seeing a very small portion of the Bungle Bungle range.  Obviously a helicopter flight is the way to see most of it, but at $255 each for 18 minutes isn’t a priority for us.

The most interesting walk so far has been Echidna Chasm.

We came back to camp for lunch, caught up on the washing and made sushi for dinner.  I’ve made the “on steroids” model, I don’t know how they make it so small and neat.  I didn’t have a reed mat, so used baking paper, but I just had too much rice etc. I did get the rice right which was a plus.  Next go, I will improve my technique, and maybe somewhere get a sushi mat :)