July 31 – August 2 Temple Gorge campground Kennedy Ranges National Park

August 4, 2018 - Reading time: 2 minutes

We bid farewell to Exmouth for the last time this trip, past Coral Bay and onto the North West Coastal Highway to Carnarvon, passing a magnificent display of the wild flowers of the region… there were patches of grasses that looked like carpet bursting into yellow, purple (both light and deep) and white flowers over two hundred kilometres.

We turned left just after crossing the Gascoyne River and made our way inland to Gascoyne Junction, finally heading north again to Kennedy Ranges National Park which is a inland desert park, which has had recent rain.

Our camp is set at the foot of Temple Gorge and is overlooked by the spectacular escarpment

We completed the Escarpment trail walk which took approximately 2 hours and was 3.5 kms in length. This indicates that is was fairly challenging with a number of climbs up the creek bed to the top of the escarpment. The countryside along the walk appears to be quite barren, but a closer inspection contradicts that with beautiful wild flowers breaking rocky sandy soil as we climbed to the top. The top was quite spectacular with the Lyon River meandering across the countryside, distant mesa’s and clay pans while the vegetation had become increasingly sparse, bringing the brilliant colours of the wild flowers out further.

In the afternoon we had another short walk up through Temple Gorge which required a large amount of scrambling over boulders and along side cliff faces – must say it was fun but not really as challenging as it sounds. However as we made our way out of the gorge the winds increased and the rain started