Day 54: Dales Gorge to Tom Price

 We greatly enjoyed our time at Dales Campground, didn't come across any of the aggressive dingos we were warned about, and Karijini is an amazing place.


Today's drive is probably the shortest of our trip so far, around 105 km, most of which is still within Karijini National Park. We are at a decent altitude here with the road pass through Mt Sheila over 800 metres high, and the second highest mountain in WA, Mt Bruce, nearby. Tom Price is the highest town in WA at around 750 m above sea level.

Because of the short drive, we are in Tom Price well ahead of check in time for the caravan park, so head into town to the tourist information centre to get some advice on what we should do during our 2 night stay here.




The population is around 3,500 residents, of which about 50% of those employed work for the mining industry.

Advice from the Tourist Information Office was pretty much as expected. Do a tour of Rio Tinto's mine, already booked for tomorrow morning. Take a drive to Hamersley Gorge tomorrow afternoon, which were were considering doing anyway. Also a 4WD drive to the summit of Mt Nameless if we have time.

To fill in time, we had a cup of coffee, bought a few things at Coles and then went on to check in at Tom Price Caravan Park, which is next to Mt Nameless.

The sites are rough, but do have a concrete slab and some different levelling features. After a fair bit of mucking around and a bit of spade work around the jockey wheel area, we managed to everything reasonably level.


All settled in

The previous camper on this site was obviously unable to recover his tent pegs. There were 3 pegs sticking dangerously out of the ground and were just inviting a broken toe or serious trip. I managed to extract 2 of them by brute force and straightened them out to add to my collection. The third one was impossible, so out came the angle grinder and I cut it off below ground level.


Mt Nameless in the background

Local highlights are a relatively short list, so we covered them within an hour. There is a park/recreation area called Kings Lake which was close to us, so we went there first.


We think this is the Lake


Not really a place for water sports

A nice bridge across the water and a resident rooster.


It is a very large nice picnic area with green grass and BBQ's etc, probably a nice  place for a family picnic.

There is a golf course, or sporting club, we noticed on the drive into town, so that is our next destination.


Looks like the finishing hole

I suspect playing this course would be thirsty work, and the club house did appear to be open, but there were no golfers on the course that we could see. Maybe they just come for a drink.


The First Hole (not sure why they call it green fees)


Being a Sports Club, they also had and Indoor Cricket Centre

On the way back to the caravan park we pass the Big Dump Truck, so call in to get a photo of the town symbol.


Just before the caravan park is the turnoff to the lookout on Mt Nameless. I drove in for about a km and decided we would come back tomorrow as I didn't feel like going through the process of deflating and re inflating tyres which would have been necessary to continue.

Back at the park by 4 pm, we had a rest and look forward to our mine site tour in the morning.








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