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.
(Click on a Photo to enlarge)

 I finally got to see my first Sturt's Desert Pea in the wild

At The Marble Bar