Untarnished, but sometimes “stained”…benignly.
I took the photo at 11.19 pm on 16 August, when a handful of humans stood on Yeagarup Beach.
This is where the Warren River meets the Southern Ocean.
In global terms, the Warren is “modest”, in both length and average flow rate.
However, its lower reaches are glorious. Beautiful, globally unique, very tall, never-logged forests segue to dunes, an estuary and a truly wild ocean shore.
As evident in the featured image, when a “properly” wet winter feeds it, the Warren carries enough tannin-rich water to darken the Southern Ocean’s edge.
(and – as a future chapter will show – the river’s mouth then moves “up the beach”, which it reshapes)
A person lucky enough to stand on Yeagarup Beach is guaranteed to see absolutely no substantial built structures, in any direction.
If you were to walk westward/northwestward along the shoreline, that description would hold true for rather more than another 100 kilometres.
Were you to cross the Warren’s mouth and then head east-ish, you would have to walk for circa 40 kilometres to reach the hamlet of Windy Harbour.
After that, you would have to walk a deal more than another 80 ks before you would reach the next (small) settlement.
Yet Pemberton, wineries, restaurants, and various comfortable accommodation choices are all no more than a 30k (inland) drive from Yeagerup Beach.
For just over a week in August my beloved and I based ourselves within five minutes of Pemberton.
All remaining chapters in this series are fruits of those days.