If yesterday’s horizontal strata needed an antidote, then Hammersley Gorge is it! Here the strata is immediately visible but utterly warped, folded and wrenched into incredible shapes. The drama of the events which created these shapes is quite unimaginable.
It’s another long drive to get to the gorge today, this time on about 50km of dirt road. The first 47km or so is on a Rio Tinto access road, and it’s one of the best dirt roads of the trip. But the final 3km is maintained by the government and it’s the worst dirt road of the trip! And so we crawled the last way, winding down to the carpark.
I am immediately struck by the colours. The rock is somehow even more red here, and the sky is bright deep blue with crisp curling white clouds. Then folds in the rock come into focus, crazy mind bending lines set into this iron-hard rock.
The walls are like a work of art and I sit to take them in. The form and story of these billion-year-old rocks brings me great wonder. I think of long hours spent in art galleries, and the works which force me to stop and then demand my time and attention before they release me from their spell. These walls arrest me in the same way.
When the spell has waned we head upstream. The water runs through fins that jut into the stream from either side. We hop between fins until the steepness becomes difficult. There’s a pool up this end which is really cool, but we now have a choice: climb up and down the fins (sharp and slippery), or swim in the water up to the pool. We strip to our swimmers and jump in. It’s not as cold as yesterday, and much much easier to get up stream.
At the pool we slowly, gently ease ourselves out of the water. The edge is very slippery and the rock is hard. The pool is known as Spa Pool, and though I’ve seen photos of it, it’s far more amazing in person. It’s more like a movie set than an natural pool. At the back is a waterfall, a vertical steam of white; the body of the pool is bright bright green, lit by the sun, with rays cutting through the water to the bottom; the sides of the pool bellow out and encapsulate the water, they also rise up high over the pool, creating a snug sheltered isolated calm. The rock walls draw the eye around the pool to the waterfall and then down into the cool water and back again – once clockwise, now anticlockwise.
We spend a little time in the pool and then climb further up its walls to look at the reverse angle. From here we can see the gorge running long away into a narrow stream caught between very high walls.
We swim back down to the centre of the gorge, where we came in, and then walk around some rock ledges before swimming further down into the narrow stream.
Here the sounds echo far up above us as we swim. The water is cool, but the sun above beats down and keeps us warm. The narrow passage lock us in for a few hundred metres, before it opens out a little to hills rising either side. Now one side becomes sheer again while the other is forested and green. The shadowy cover of trees is cooling. The stream becomes shallower and more rocky, and then disappears into many small streams between thick trees. We rest here for a while before starting to get cold.
One our way back I clamber up on side to take some photos right along the narrow passage (Anna for scale).
Once again, the ancient rock, incredible colours, adventure and joy of exploration has made today very special.
[Click on a photo to open a full-screen slide show]
