Day 93 Exmouth, WA

Charles Knife Gorge and the Badjirrajirra Trail was our direction today.  A fellow traveller told us that it was a must see and to think of Charles Knife Gorge as a baby Grand Canyon.   She is probably right to some degree but at just 500 metres deep and just a few kilometres in length, it is nowhere near as grand.  But nothing can take away the rugged beauty of this phenomenal place.  

The journey up the steep winding road towards the top is hair raising to say the least.  At two points the road narrows to just a single vehicle width wide and if you have the courage to look either side of the road it is a sheer drop of hundreds of metres.  Eyes on the road with just a very quick glance for us!

The road in to Thomas Carter Lookout, where our walk begins, is only eleven kilometres but took us almost a half hour with a couple of stops at various lookouts. It was pleasing to see a few vehicles parked in the parking area so we knew we would not be doing this strenuous walk alone.  Once we had packed water, and batteries into the backpack we set off.  The path for the first one kilometres is all downhill, that is always a worry for me knowing that when you are at the end of your walk and feeling weary you have an uphill walk.  However, onward and upwards (or downwards in this case).

This walk is a Class 4 that means you will be walking on uneven ground and ascending and descending hills.  We have walked Class 4 previously but not the length of this one that was around eight kilometres.  The sign at the beginning of the walk told us to allow four hours and our Apple Watches told us at the end that we walked for 160 minutes or two hours forty minutes. 

The first part of the walk is on fairly flat ground, albeit rocky, with lots of spinifix and it doesn't seem to take us long to get to the lookout where we can see Shothole Canyon.  Shothole was named after the shot holes left by seismographic charge explosions during oil searches in the Cape Range in the 1950's.  Because of these holes we are now able to see the colourful, rock layers of the canyon wall.

After the lookout we had a choice to walk back the way we walked in or continue along the loop walk.  We talked to a family that had just completed the loop walk and they said it was a bit boring and you would be better going back the way you came.  But, we decided to forge ahead with the loop.  It just goes to show that you shouldn't really listen to anybody else's opinion because the loop walk was really a great walk.  We followed the escarpment right along the edge of the canyon for around two kilometres before the track started to head back towards the carpark.  This is when the track became really quite difficult and should probably have been classified Class 5.  We had to negotiated some very steep gullies and we were extremely grateful for the path markers dotting the path otherwise we may have become very disorientated.  The path was nothing more than a goat track.  At one particularly steep gully I almost said to Philip that we should turn back but when I looked at the distance we had covered I realised that we were only two kilometres from our starting point and if we turned back it was almost six kilometres.

Thank goodness for the path markers

You can't see it from this photo but we had to descend  and ascend a deep gully at this point

The carpark is in the background on top of that distant ridge.

I was ever so grateful when we finally reached the junction between the loop walk and canyon lookout.  But I knew that we still had a very long upward journey to reach the car.  By this time my legs felt like jelly and it was hard to put one foot in front of the other.  We stopped quite a few times on the upward journey to have a bit of a breather, but not for long.  I felt if I stopped too long I might never get going again! It was a huge relief when we finally made it back to the carpark.  We both flopped into the seats in the car and sat there for awhile just contemplating what we had both achieved on this walk.  It was very arduous. But now that I am sitting back in the comfort of our caravan I'm thinking to myself it wasn't that bad.  But don't ask me to do it again 😩......

This is a photo out of a brochure that I picked up of what the canyon looks like in the right light.  It's pretty spectacular.

And here is a little GoPro footage that Philip took.  He's becoming quite the videographer!