Sunday 28th April - Narrogin to Dryandra

55km

We had bacon and eggs at the motel before heading off to fill up with fuel in Narrogin.

We quickly found the micro cache in the pioneer park before joining Ross and Jan on the corner and heading for Dryandra.

We hadn’t done the event here mid-week, but kept on hearing about how beautiful the area was – and we were not disappointed.

We arrived at the Old Mill Dam and had a lovely time reading about the area and the various animals which live in this little microsystem. It is unique and home to a number of very endangered species – including one of our favourites – the Numbat.

We went off for a 6km walk to see if we could see a numbat, while Ross and Jan checked out the local wildlife and put the washing out to dry that they had washed at the motel the night before. 

The walk (Woylie Walk) was lovely – with many changes of vegetation. We wandered through lots of vegetation that we don’t remember ever seeing before. Apparently there were Powder Wandoo bark (which left a pale pink residue on your hands if you rubbed it) , kwongan heathlands, jarrah and sheoak. Sometimes the vegetation looked soft, but when you touched it it was hard.

We did the pink walk. 

The signs for the walk - follow the woylie.  If you can find the first sign you are fine from there.  It took us a while to do that.

We called these triffid trees. 

changing natives

 

strange spiky leaves

pea gravel at the base of a tree. Walking on pea gravel is interesting .  

hidden camera (maybe it sees numbats)

I could have taken photos of bark all day.So beautiful

We hoped to find numbats as it was the middle of the day (their favourite time )- but we were out of luck. No numbats for us today.

We had lunch by the dam 

  

information about an amazing teacher who saved this area from mining and taught Australia about conservation and the joy of discovering nature.

Look up or you might miss something...

  

before driving on (via the Darwinia Drive) , but we added in some detours- taking in a vague track , not used much recently, which seemed to follow along the old telegraph line from many years ago. (still some posts and insulators in place).

At times the track here was quite overgrown down the centre and at the sides with quite scratchy vegetation.

powder form the powder gum 

  

We added on a bit of track to take us to the Congelin campsite, where we decided to stay the night.  The charge to do this is $11 per adult (send it in to the local office in the envelope supplied).

They have camp kitchens with bbqs and fire pits, tables and benches and an old tank stand from when the train used to go through here from Pinjarra to Narrogin. 

A lovely quiet bush setting, but it will take us a very long time to make it back home if we keep on travelling at this pace!! The old stockyards were huge and the Toyota landcruiser club have built a replica one too, (still the old fashioned way) just a little further up the track, so that you can see what they were like better.  Very solid.  The animals were loaded on to the train here. 

our first camp together. Jan and Ross were parked to the left of the photo. 

We took a nice quiet night walk to the nearby dam (1.6km return) hoping that we might see some nocturnal animals, but no luck.  We scared some ducks at the dam (but didn’t see them), saw one kangaroo on the way there, and picked out some spiders as their eyes reflected in the torch light. The pick of the night was a tawny frogmouth which flew in quietly when we were nearly back to camp.