Geikie Gorge, WA (Fitzroy Crossing)

We took the one hour boat cruise up the Fitzroy River to view the Geikie Gorge, which despite being in the dry season, is a huge body of water, a bit like a giant billabong. The rocks lining both side are the same Devonian reef system that we saw at Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek, except here it is in the river itself. It's been raining for a few days and apparently the wildlife are straying in bed. We saw one or two crocs instead of 'hundreds' and one goanna instead of heaps. The Rock Martin birds are sitting in the trees instead of building their nests and basically the whole wildlife population is confused as to wether its the dry or the wet. They say it was a dry wet and that we now have a wet dry, if that makes and sense.

During the wet season, this whole place floods, every year, never misses. The biggest flood was last year when it was 2 metres above the gazebo (see photos). I had to laugh, you know how everything water wise is measured in multiples of Sydney Harbours? Well here they say that during the flood, the amount of water flowing down the Fitzroy would fill Sydney harbour every 10 hours. That is a lot of water.

The rock is basically limestone, having been a coral reef a gozillion years ago. The flood waters carry millions of tons of sand down the river (where from? Where to?), which erodes the limestone, but not in the nice rounded way you normally see, but into sharp edges and angular shapes, like its been carved with a knife. 

As in so many places in the outback, large tracks of land have been returned to the aboriginal owners, and Geikie Gorge is no exception. The place was named by some bureaucrat in Perth after an English geologist, Sir Archibald Geikie, who incidentally never came anywhere near Australia. This wrong will be righted in the near future when it will be renamed Darngku, which is the traditional name for the area.

Here is but one snap:

Geikie Gorge, WA