Monday March 24

Sticking to the plan, we left Denmark last Wednesday March 19, but seeing as the weather forecast was quite wrong and it was a beautiful day, we called in to Greens Pool and also Elephant Cove, which we hadn’t even bothered with the day before, as we had to drive right past them on our way to Parry Beach.

Was an inspired move, as it was just glorious down on the beach and the pool looked just as it does in the tourist brochures – what a difference the sun makes! Murray enjoyed a swim and we relaxed on the beach for a while before walking around the ‘corner’ to Elephant Cove. More absolutely stunning granite rocks, nestled in the clear, shallow water of the cove which would have looked much less beautiful if the sun was not shining, so we felt very lucky that the weather was so perfect for us.

Greens Pool 

Greens Pool

Elephant Cove

Elephant Rocks

After dragging ourselves away from here we set forth for Parry Beach – a whole 24 kilometres away! When we arrived at the little camp ground we discovered much to our horror that our van would not fit under the ‘bar’ erected at the entrance to keep out giant caravans. After much advice from the ‘assistant’ caretaker and other assorted caravanners we found ourselves in the overflow park, which happily had no such obstacles.

Murray, being the hunter-gatherer that he is, noticed a great deal of activity further around the bay, so cadged a lift with the Ranger who was driving down there - more beach driving, in fact it was like a road there were so many going up and down. It transpired that the commercial fisherman who has the licence for the area was hauling in some 15 tonnes of salmon in his nets. Murray enthusiastically lent a hand, so ended up with a lovely salmon – big bonus for us!

The salmon haul

Murray's share!

Cleaning the salmon on the rocks

Thursday morning dawned grey and windy, so we decided to move on and set ‘sail’ towards Walpole. This brought us into the Southern Forests region and forests like we had been introduced to around Denmark took over from the beautiful heathland vegetation as we travelled further from the coast and entered the Walpole Wilderness. East of Nornalup is the Valley of the Giants, the only area in which Western Australia’s enormous Red Tingle trees (Eucalyptus jackonsii) grow - a total of only 6,000 hectares, as they require at least 1200mm of rainfall per year to survive.

Here the Tree Top Walk, a very impressive 600 metre suspension bridge, soars 40 metres into the forest canopy and the views of the Red Tingle and Marri trees from here are awe-inspiring. As high as we were, many of the trees still towered above us as Red Tingle trees can reach a height of 75 metres, with a girth of 20 metres.

Despite the size of the trees, the Red Tingle tree flowers are very small and delicate

At ground level the Ancient Empire Walk allowed us to meander through a grove of giant trees, some of which are estimated to be 400 years old. As we contemplated the grandeur of the Red Tingle, the growth habit of which defies logic, we kept asking ourselves how they had survived the vicious regime of clearance which accompanied the arrival of European settlers in the Great Southern. Maybe the large hollowed out bases which develop as fire, fungal and insect attack remove the dead wood from the centre, which in turn causes the development of the large buttressed trunks required to support these shallow-rooted trees, made them unsuitable for timber.

Buttressed, hollow trunk

Hollow trunk extraordinaire! Note the 'boardwalk' - because of the shallow roots,
these trees die very easily from soil compaction caused by people stamping all over them!

It is impossible to give any real impression of the size of these
trees, but I can't help trying

Nature's art work at its best - the bark and maybe even the beginning of a burl
on a Red Tingle tree

'Grandma Tingle' - so called because of the gnarled bark and
burls (could just as readily be called a 'Grandpa Tingle'!), giving
it an almost human presence watching over the forest.
Sadly, many humans would not be so benign, so some other
sort of being might be more appropriate

From here we travelled on to Walpole, set on Walpole Inlet which is joined by a narrow channel to the larger Nornalup Inlet and where Karri and Tingle forest grow right to the waters’ edge. Walpole is surrounded by the 18,000 hectare Walpole-Nornalup National Park, which is in turn one of the seven national parks which make up the 363,000 hectare Walpole Wilderness area, so it was a wonderful spot in which to spend the rest of the day. As impressive as all this sounds, we must keep reminding ourselves that a mere 4% of this country is protected in national parks.

The Knoll, Coalmine Beach, Walpole Inet

The area features three sites together called ‘The Walpole Wilderness Discovery Centre’ – the Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk, Mount Frankland and Swarbrick, each of which is designed to offer a different interpretation of this environment.

As the weather had improved we spent the afternoon visiting the two sites we had not yet seen, starting with the Swarbrick Art Trail which winds through old growth Karri trees. Whilst most of the art work did not do much for us, the 39 metre ‘Wilderness Wall of Perceptions’ – a huge mirror with historical information about the settlement, exploitation and subsequent action to protect these old growth forests (more pesky environmentalists and thank goodness for their efforts!) etched into its surface was very impressive.

Hope you can read the extract on the leaf - it is pretty scarey!

From here we travelled up to Mount Frankland through absolutely superb old growth Karri trees, which towered beside the road and elicited constant exclamations of wonder and delight. As it was still quite misty and drizzly, we didn’t make the trek up to the summit, but we did thoroughly enjoy the Wilderness View – a raised walkway offering spectacular views across the Mount Frankland National Park Wilderness area.

Magnificent Karri trees

Back down to the Frankland River where we walked to Circular Pool, an area of calm rocky pools which are apparently ‘raging torrents’ of water after winter rains. More beautiful black rocks!

We just managed to make it to the Giant Tingle Tree before the light faded too much and what an amazing and impressive sight it is! This tree has a girth of 24 metres, is 75 metres tall and is probably over 400 years old - how it continues to grow is nothing short of miraculous! It is one of the ten largest living things in the world.

A magnificent Karri tree with quite a collection of burls.
If these are the result of damage to the tree, this one must
have had a tough time as it was growing up!

This will have to be it for this post as we are currently camped in an area out of Pemberton which has no signal at all, so I have organised this much to upload today whilst we are in Manjimup and will bring you all up to date properly when we next have internet access. This has been such a fascinating area I need more time to do it justice!