Tom Price

While at Tom Price we booked a tour through the Rio Tinto Mine. Here we saw big boys’ toys, enormous Tonka trucks and excavators. We saw one of the larger iron ore pits, which they have been mining since 1963, back then there was 15 to 20 years worth of mining. They are still mining today and say they have another 15 to 20 years left, who knows… We saw a train being loaded, it was two and a half kms long, and worth about $2 million dollars a load, four trains were loaded daily.

Tom Price is a town outside Karrijini National Park where we stayed. Our first visit included a different walk to what we have been used to. We started off strolling through the park, walking through water waist high. Continued onto the Spider Walk, where we walked through a narrow gorge over slippery rocks holding onto both sides of the gorge. The next section was called the Handrail, here we held onto a handrail and carefully walked down the rail. It was like a fireman’s poll, but you climbed slow and steady. At the end was the pool, unfortunately in a very long time we had to endure a 23 degree cool day. The weather the following days picked up so we were happy again.

We had a visit from a relative of Marc’s come over for dinner, Vince works in the mines. It was lovely to see a familiar face, we were able to catch up and have an enjoyable night.

Back to Karrijini, this time to the Circular Pool, the next couple of walks was not long but were steep, walking down to the bottom of the gorge. We did not swim here for there were leeches in the water. Back for lunch and onto our walk to Fortescue Falls, it was a large pool with a waterfall and a natural seating area around the pool, due to the rock formation. Here we were able to swim and enjoy the environment over lunch.