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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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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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My feet were planted on the same strand, and this post’s photo was taken only moments later than was the final image in this series’ chapter #6.
Common to both: foam…foam with which one can be “relaxed and comfortable”.
Its presence on Yeagarup Beach was entirely benign.
No alga was “blooming”.
The Warren River’s and the relevant section of the Southern Ocean’s waters were not polluted.
Q: so what was going on?
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A river’s mouth and the beach it breaches – or only sometimes manages to breach – can be very dynamic places.
From one visit to another, they may display utterly different “faces” to an occasional visitor.
Anyone familiar with the mouth of the not-so-mighty Murray, adjacent to the Coorong, knows that even a river mouth’s “precise” location can be a highly-movable feast…or famine.
This is also true of many much more “modest” rivers, such as the Warren.
On the winter morning of 16 August, this particular meeting of river and ocean underwent many changes in mood, even within a single half-hour.
Comments closedThis post’s and the previous chapter’s photos were taken within the space of one minute, from almost the very same spot on Yeagarup Beach.…
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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)
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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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The featured image (all photos copyright Doug Spencer, 27 October 2016) was taken from Yeagarup Beach, circa 30 kilometres from Pemberton.
The Southern Ocean’s shore was just behind me, as I gazed across the Warren River’s lowermost section.
To get there, we had driven through some of Australia’s most beautiful “virgin” tall Eucalypt forest, then crossed the Southern Hemispere’s largest land-locked mobile dune system.
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