2015/10 Australia trip - Warren |
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We’d been driving through forest, past wineries and sheep farms but no towns, and as we needed milk we purposely headed into Pemberton for some shopping. Nearby was yet 
another national park, Warren, our fourth of the day.
Warren had a campground somewhere so this was where we were going to stay. The main exhibit there is the Dave Evans tree, a very tall karri which used to be a fire lookout tree and is now open to anyone who wants to climb the pegs to the top. Take a look at how far up the second platform is. There was a bunch of young Japanese about halfway up. I’d have been tempted if I’d had it to myself but I’m too slow these days to share.
Nearby is the Heartbreak Trail, named by the fire fighters who had to build it. For us it was a delightful single lane track; it winds up and down and around the karri trees. 
Partway around we found Drafty’s campground. We set up camp there about an hour before sunset, leaving us enough time to walk the trail along the Warren River to a set of rapids. The river was another good canoeing spot we thought, with the rapids easy to negotiate. The setting sun was lighting up the foliage, reflected by almost still water. We had to bushwhack through the foliage in a few places where trees had fallen on the trail.
Wednesday October 21st
We were picking ticks off each other in the morning. These were much smaller than the easily detected kangaroo ticks, about the size of Minnesota’s deer ticks. They’d had time to swell up with our blood and we had red, itchy welts where they’d burrowed in (and still do, months later!)
We drove the rest of the Heartbreak Trail, some areas festooned with these clematis vines, also called old man’s beard. 
We’d been seeing these distinctive trees among the karri, a sharp contrast with their dark heavily fissured bark. In the absence of any better info we’d called them chocolate flake trees or 99s, but their actual name seems to be jarrah.
One of the park’s signs carried the surprising news that the Warren River is salty. Apparently, westerlies hurtling around the Southern Ocean carry salt spray far inland to the river’s headwaters where it falls as salty rain. The park area gets enough normal rain that it’s not much of a problem but farmers in drier areas aren’t as lucky.
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