MARBLE BAR WA

 Marble Bar is a tiny little place located 1465 kms 200 kms south east of Port Headland and is renowned as Australia's hottest Town. Here, in the summer months temperatures exceed 38 degrees for days on end. Indeed it is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as such. In the summer of 1923-24 Marble Bar recorded a temperature of above 38.7c (100 degrees F) on 161 consecutive days! Today however it is a cool 20 c thank goodness. There is not much as far as a town goes, the Roadhouse at the entrance was closed due to no power being available and  another in the main street was out of diesel until further notice. The only other commercial building is the unusual Iron Clad Hotel made from corrugated iron sheeting.
  Our reason for coming here was to visit the jasper deposit known as the Marble Bar about 5 kms from the main street. Marble Bar, crossing the Coongan river was so named by Nathaniel Cooke, a gold prospector, who mistook the Jasper to be Marble and the name stuck.
  Jasper is an opaque, impure variety of silica, usually red, yellow, brown or green in colour and rarely blue. The common red colour is due to iron(III). Jasper breaks with a smooth surface, and is used for ornamentation or as a gemstone as it can be highly polished. It is particularly attractive in the raw form when wet as the colours really stand out and it does then look just like marble.
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 I finally got to see my first Sturt's Desert Pea in the wild

At The Marble Bar

BROOME TO PORT HEADLAND WA

  Over the last couple of weeks we have moved south from Broome on the north west coast of the Kimberly's WA south to Port Headland in the Pilbara region, a distance of about 650 kms. along the way we spent our nights mostly in Rest Areas and at Sandfire Roadhouse. Sandfire was notable for its collection of pets that included a fine looking Bull, a Camel and many Peacocks that roamed through the campsite. De Grey River Rest Area is worth a mention being a nice spot beside a river that at last had some water in it.
  Our visit to Port Headland, a sprawling and not very pretty mining town didn't impress me much with abundant Road Trains and other mining vehicles and not much else. The Iron Ore mines are all around the area extending out as far as Marble Bar, 200 kms to the west. There is also a Salt Mine on the water's edge right at the entrance to the town. It seems that everything that happens here is related to the mining industry.
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The Pets of Sandfire Roadhouse

De Grey River Rest Area