Karijini NP Joffre and Knox Gorges WA

It’s another beautiful day as we head out of Dales camping area. It’s a surprising 40km to Joffre Gorge. We start with a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs. 

Then tackled the track down. 

Love the patterns in the rocks.

We descend the several ladders that bring us down to a large pool. We head to the left over the rock ledges for a view on the gorge. 

Then we retracted back and headed to the right of the ladders to the amphitheatre with water pool. This was a bit trickier but we managed without getting wet! We can just try to imagine water it would be like after heavy rain fall, seeing the water cascade down into this area.

We then retraced our route back out and went to the 2 lookouts to see the view from above. Overall we walked 2km over 1.5 hours.

6km further on was Knox Gorge (class 5). 

The first 300m was straight downhill over loose rocks. 

But once down it was a relatively easy walk following the water stream to the first large water hole. 

We decided to have a swim on the way back, so we continued on and once again we had to cling to the rock edge, but it was worth it. About 400m got us to the end of the gorge with spectacular landscape. 

We doubled back and went for a refreshing dip (colder than the Dales). 

Then continued to the base of the track. We did go a bit further to look at the water pool there which has beautiful colour surrounded by lovely vegetation.

Next was the climb back up which we found much easier to do going up rather than down. We ended our visit at the lookout.  Overall 3km/2hour visit.

The day was getting on and so we decided to head back to camp … tomorrow we will tackle more gorges.