28 August - Bungle Bungle (Purnululu) National Park – walks of the Southern Section

28 August 2016 – 185 219

Bungle Bungle (Purnululu) National Park – walks of the Southern Section

This morning we drove from the Bungle Bungle Caravan Park to Purnululu National Park.
https://parks.dpaw.wa.gov.au/park/purnululu
This is 53km of challenging dirt road, this took a bit over an hour and a half.  We then signed into the National Park, even if you have a park pass you need to sign into each park each day in Western Australia; but you don’t need to sign out.  From the Visitor Information Centre we drove to the Southern Section of the park (27km more of rough dirt).  https://parks.dpaw.wa.gov.au/site/piccaninny-creek
We arrived just before 10am and set out on our walk.  We visited The Domes, which are like what I expected of the Bungle Bungles, individual domes of striped rock.  We then walked to Cathedral Gorge, which, even in this extreme dry, still had water in it.  This would be amazing to see (although far too dangerous on foot) with water flowing down the waterfall during the wet season.

We then continued to Piccaninny Creek Lookout and The Window which each gave different views of the Bungle Bungle Range. If you were stopping here, it is probably not worth the extra walk to The Window from Piccaninny Creek Lookout.  However, we continued on into the far end of Whip Snake Gorge – this was lovely and cool and quite pretty.  We enjoyed a picnic lunch in the cool shade.  We then headed out back to the carpark.  All up, this was 14.3km and took four hours.  This was an extremely exposed walk, in that we were walking on either bare sand or bare rock ninety percent of the time, with heat reflecting off the surrounding rock faces and no shade.  Despite the large quantities of water we were carrying, we had used all of it up and were keen to reach the car and have more to drink – lesson learnt and no harm done – take even more water if there is no protection from the sun, and it is worth getting up really early tomorrow.  When we got home we all enjoyed a shower – mine was somewhat interrupted as the power went out multiple times, resulting in the water stopping and each time I had to wrap my towel around me and go and find someone to turn it back on, of course this hadn’t started until the shampoo was in my hair!!  Eventually I ended up clean.  Alarm is set for an earlier start tomorrow as we plan another long walk.