Millstream Park

Millstream National Park is a wonderful oasis in the midst of the arid Pilbara. Between the Hamersleys and Millstream, we’d spent a night on the outskirts of the iron ore-mining town of Mt. Tom Price, which was pleasant enough, but we were delighted to get back to wilderness—especially this wilderness. It was a real change [...]

Spinifex Pigeons

Despite the fact that much of the Pilbara is dry to the point of crispness, there is a surprising amount of flora and fauna, particularly close to places, such as the gorges, where water is available much of the year. Wildflowers, eucalypts, acacias, and spinifex dot the landscape and offer homes to birds, bugs, lizards, [...]

Weano Gorge

The way water has carved through the rocks in the Hamersley Range has created an interesting variety of gorges. Some, such as Wittenoom Gorge and Yampire Gorge, are wide and have broken out of the side of the great land mass, making them accessible by road. Most, however, have carved down through the rock in [...]

Wittenoom

Wittenoom was named for one of the locals—Frank Wittenoom. It was given this name by Frank’s partner at a nearby station, Lang Hancock, for whom Hancock Gorge is named. Today, only a handful of people remain in Wittenoom, though it was close to being a ghost town even when we visited it. The nearby asbestos [...]

Hamersley Gorge

If you know anything about plate tectonics, you know that the surface of the planet is not static. It is, rather, in constant, if slow, motion, with continents moving, seas opening and closing—and earthquakes and volcanoes along the edges where the plates meet. Over the ages, land has been repositioned, created, destroyed, pushed under, and [...]

Dales Gorge

The region through which we were now traveling is called the Pilbara. The Pilbara is a large (197,000 square miles), rugged, and remote region of northwestern Western Australia where both the Hamersley and Chichester Ranges are located. It is arid and can be on the warm side. In fact, Marble Bar, a town in the [...]

Port Hedland

A long day of driving carried us from Broome to Port Hedland. The town was small enough, with a lovely location on the ocean, and it catered to my particular addiction to sea shells (bought three lovely ones), but it fell short of charming me because it was also the location of a great deal [...]

Broome Old and New

When I first visited Broome, it was a wonderfully rustic and yet still vaguely exotic place with multi-lingual street signs that reflected the multi-ethnic population. There was no landscaping other than what nature provided. Shops tended to be either Asian-run, incense-scented establishments with fans turning lazily overhead or open-air venues where barefooted and often shirtless [...]

Around Broome

I spent my first day in Broome seeing some of the sights. Stuart took me first to the Japanese cemetery. Because Broome has long been a center of the pearling industry, Japanese pearl divers arrived fairly early in Broome’s history. Unfortunately, no one knew about “the bends,” or diver’s paralysis, when pearl diving was in [...]

Waking up in Broome

It’s funny the things you learn after a book comes out. When I arrived in Broome—late at night after 21 hours on a bus—Stuart had said that “we put up your tent for you, as we reckoned you’d be tired after your trip.” I assumed “we” was him, and that’s what I wrote in the [...]