Gibb River Rd - Mt Hart Wilderness – 3 to 4 August 2010

We drove on to Mt. Hart Wilderness Lodge managed by Taffy Abbott and Kim in partnership with the Department of Environment and Conservation.
Mt. Hart has the lodge for visitors who fly or drive in and an attached camp ground away from the homestead on the Barker River. This is a good camp spot. Free of saltwater crocodiles the river is a great place to swim at the end of the day.
We walked up Annie Creek Gorge in the afternoon.

Although the resort dining room is for lodge visitors, if there are spaces available for meals these are listed in the campground laundry. We booked dinner by putting our names on the list at the laundry before 3.00PM. Dinner was an excellent three course buffet meal for $35, with the evening’s cook being the owner Taffy. The meal started with an unusual grace: “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful I didn't mess it up.”
After dinner we remained at the bar and paid to use the satellite internet, our last connection for a while. Mt. Hart Station was operational from 1914 to 1987 and had a succession of highly eccentric owners, none of whom appeared to have made a cent from the operations. We liked the sign in the bar, “Drive Carefully – We have two Cemeteries – No Hospitals.”
The King Leopold Conservation Park has some unique geological landforms and is a very stable landmass remaining more or less unchanged since it arose from the ancestral glop. It was declassified as a farming lease in 2000 and gazetted as the King Leopold Conservation Park, with Mt. Hart excised as a lease from the Park.