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What a difference five minutes can make!
By 4.55pm on 18 August 2025 the skies above Warren National Park had become overcast, whilst the Warren River’s surface remained “glassy”.
The gentler light improved a camera’s ability to capture the subtle beauty of the forest’s understorey – as viewed directly, and as reflected by the river.
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30 minutes on from the taking of the previous chapter’s photos, we were just a little further upstream.
The sun was low in the sky, which was still mostly-blue – or had again become so.
Briefly, no wind was blowing.
This particular stretch of the Warren River was now almost-entirely unruffled.
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In Warren National Park on the afternoon of 18 September 2025 the weather was highly dynamic.
Whatever was your favourite kind of winter weather – windy or calm, raining or dry, sunny or overcast – you could reasonably expect at least one fleeting dose of it within the space of a single hour.
This post shows the Warren River, the forest through which it flows and the sky above, as they appeared at 4.20 and 4.21 pm.
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Warren National Park’s Karri-dominated forest is – by Australian standards – a moist, cool environment, albeit definitely not rainforest.
Most visitors mostly look up; for many tourists, the Warren’s big trees are the tallest living things they have ever seen.
It is also a good idea to look down, to pay attention to non-huge things, and to remember that “dead” wood is never lifeless.
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Western Australia’s tallest tree species naturally occurs only in a small, relatively wet portion of the state’s southwest.
Karri – Eucalyptus diversicolour – is one of Australia’s tall Eucalypts; collectively, they are the world’s tallest flowering plants.
Karri is not the tallest of them, but the biggest karri trees are among “our” planet’s most massive living individuals.
Counter-intuitive, but true: Europe’s tallest (reliably measured) tree is a karri, planted circa 130 years ago in Portugal.
The Karri Knight (circa 75 metres) is a little shorter than is the tallest WA-resident karri.
Virgin karri forest is extraordinarily beautiful, and can only be experienced in a small number of Western Australian places.
Warren National Park has no peer, at least among those which are readily 2WD-accessible.
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For easy access to magnificent virgin Karri forest, there is no better place than Warren National Park.
Its main entry point is only a few minutes’ drive from Pemberton.
My beloved and I have been there many times.
No two times are the same, even when they are only hours apart!
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This post’s featured colour photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken just four minutes before – and from almost the same vantage point – as the immediately preceding post’s monochrome image.
I have been lucky enough to walk in many different kinds of forest, on six continents and various islands.
All are beautiful, in many different ways, but if I had to choose a favourite, it would be so-called “virgin Karri forest”.
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