Caving in the Wilderness

FAR NORTH-WEST WESTERN AUSTRALIA – 22 June – 11 July 2025
Caving in such a remote area, in my opinion, is the Last Frontier.  When we find a new cave, in the middle of no-where, it is almost guaranteed that we will be the first humans to enter the cave (although geologists have been
walking over the area for a long time sampling the area for mining companies!). We’ve been told that the First Nations people weren’t keen to enter caves.

This would be my third visit to this area of WA which has blocks of karst that we explore looking for caves.  The karst has been explored for many years by various caving clubs but for the last 18 years Illawarra Speleological Society (ISS) has been leading the way with a 2 – 3 week trip to the area pretty much every year.

The focus of the trip is looking for caves and then surveying and documenting them, there’s no “recreational caving involved”, and If you are not an ISS member you have to apply to attend, group dynamics is taken into account and whether or not there will be enough 4WD vehicles to get participants from the camp site to remote karst blocks.  I’ve been fortunate to participate in three expeditions.

Karst:  So, what’s karst (for non-cavers)? Karst is landforms and features as a result of the dissolution of soluble carbonate rocks such as limestone.  Most limestone was formed in shallow marine environments, such as coral reefs.  When it is exposed, and because limestone is slightly soluble in rainwater, the exposed limestone is often eroded to become karst landscapes. Most cave systems are found in limestone bedrock but in northwest WA, the caves are found in karst blocks which are on the flood plains.  Each day we travelled up to 20k from our campsite to these isolated blocks.

The “hill” in the distance is a karst block and we’re walking across the flood plain. We did find a half-way decent cave in this block.

Part of another karst block, we’re looking at the holes in the karst which may (or may not) lead to a chamber (a cave) in the block which has been eroded by rainfall. Note, there weren’t any in this particular part of the block.

Another block in the same area, on this occasion when we climbed up a few metres a cave was found.

So, now you know where I went and what I’ll be doing, here’s a bit about logistics …

The Road In:  We’re in the wilderness but are in cattle country so we have to stop frequently when the cattle are on the road or pull off to the edge of the road for trucks.

On the way in to our campsite we came across a road train with a load of cattle heading for export (a lot of the cattle from this property are headed for Indonesia of all places).

The cows had dropped a lot of calves over the past few weeks – they were really cute! There here at a salt station.  The cattle used to be mostly Brahman (the white ones selected for their tolerance to hot humid conditions) but other breeds (the brown ones) are apparently being introduced to cross breed.

Weather:  There’d been an unseasonable 75mm of rain 3 or 4 weeks prior to my arrival, so that got that out of the way.  Temperatures ranged from 30-33°C during the day (not too bad figuring we’re so far north) but it was pretty cold at night dropping to around 9°C which meant that I was in bed by 6.30pm and reluctant to get up until around 6.00am! And I really didn’t have enough warm clothes!

Snakes:  As most people know I have a fear of snakes – I cannot even look at them.  Given that I had to walk >200m on a bush track to get to our bush toilet, I definitely was anxious for the whole 3 weeks – to the extent that I had a sheet of white plastic outside my tent to make sure there were no snakes at the front door when I had to leave the tent – and I kept my shoes inside the tent the whole time.  Whilst (thank goodness) I didn’t see any snakes at our campsite (or on the track), we saw 4 Olive Pythons (ranging from 2.5m to 3m) when surface trogging and surveying, and 1 Black-headed Python crossing the 4WD track near Cathi and Rod’s camp site … I didn’t actually see it but was told about it.  Given that 3 weeks beforehand when Bob joined some US cavers who mwere doing some scientific research and used the same campsite, the professor got bitten by a snake (at night near Bob’s van), I feel so lucky that our 3 weeks were relatively snake free.  Wasn’t all that worried about the Olive Pythons, they were so big, I don’t think they could have moved very fast LOL.

Cathi’s photo of the black headed python, it was late afternoon and it apparently was making it’s way over to the karst block behind where Cathi and Rod were camping. Was about 2m long.

The Bush Toilet:  I mentioned the bush toilet above, imagine 3 weeks having to dig a hole in the bush and squatting over it – ugh!   Bob has made it very civilised for us … the guys dig a trench (about as wide as a shovel, about 40cm deep and usually around 1.5m long) and over the trench sits a portable camp toilet commode – so no squatting.  The trench is filled in as we go.

3 weeks with no bathroom:  Is actually not a problem, we camp beside a creek with a lovely pool where we can swim and wash off the sweat of the day.  Bob also has a shower tent (away from the creek so we can use soap and shampoo), a proper shower with nozzle and water is pumped up from the creek.  If you’re quick, you can be first and the water is warm after the hose has been laying in the sun all day.

The pool that we can swim in, just behind the trees is the track that we drive in on and our camp is 10m to the right of the trees.

Food:  We have to take most of the food for the 3 weeks in with us, although we could call up Kununurra resident Les on the Sat Phone if we needed anything like fresh lettuce.  Bob had a freezer and 2 coolers all of which were powered by the solar panels that he had set up.  Bob created a menu for the 3 weeks and then purchased all of the items required in Kununurra before we left.  All Denis and I had to bring were items for breakfast and lunch.  Denis did most of the cooking, and I did the food prep.  By the end of the 3 weeks, we were a well-oiled machine!

Bob’s camper van and our outdoor kitchen.

Denis did most of the cooking for the 3 weeks, a novelty for him.

The Caves:  I did 15 out of the 17 days of caving – I had 2 days off due to an injured knee.  Over the 17 days we found approximately 25 new caves and surveyed most of them, they ranged from 20m of passage (nothing under 10m is tagged or surveyed) to 200m of passage.  Some caves had been identified a month prior to our trip so we went to those and surveyed them.

25 June – First we surveyed KNI89 – we had to find it first LOL.  Then we went over to KNI202 where Bob went up to the entrance of a cave with plans to put the bat recording machine in place to make sure there were no bats in the cave.  There were, so we surveyed 43m up to the roosting spot and left the rest for another day.  Finished at 4.30pm – a long day.

26 June – quite a bit of surface trogging looking for caves, finding KNI203 Macropods Rest (evidence of quite a few wallaby bones in the cave). Surveyed most of it till we came to a 2m pitch – another cave to return to next year with SRT gear.  Leaving that cave behind we walked around a corner and found another cave KNI204 Figtree Cave with a 4m pitch, so another one to leave for next year (that’s Bob looking down the 4m pitch).

27 June – today we had a 1.5k walk to KNI197 Ocean Surprise where we did 5 hours of surveying for 206m of mostly phreatic passages, 50% of the surveying was walk through, the rest was crawly annoying passages.

27 June – part of the nice walk-through passageways.

27 June – unfortunately when the passageways became narrower the walls were covered with this cave coral that grabs hold of your clothing (and can scratch your skin).

When we had finished with Ocean Surprise, on the walk back to the car we could smell smoke, so we climbed one of the rocks nearby and could see far in the distance smoke – so we played it safe and instead of doing more exploring high-tailed it back to our camp (and the pool of water) just in case the fire (which was about 20k away), headed for our camp.

28 June – we headed over to KNI198 (found during the scientific trip) to complete a survey that they previous team had started.  We were finished after 2.5 hours and decided that we’d give ourselves a holiday and go back to camp to welcome in the rest of the team, Rod OB, Cath H-H, Peter D, Les and Alison S.  They were already settled in, so we decided to have an early Happy Hour!

29 June – after 5 hours of surface trogging and finding nothing, we went back to the area we were camping and a recreational trip through KNI150 Nice Cave that I apparently surveyed 2 years ago. I had a vague recollection LOL.

30 June – The aim for today was to walk 3k to Marvellous Cave, KNI163, which they have been surveying for the past 3 years.  There are some areas where the formations are outstanding (this is a shot of one of them), but we didn’t visit those areas this time, we mostly surveyed some crawly passageways – some of which were muddy.  I have to say I was happy when we finished up.  Still more to do next year, there is over 1 kilometre of passageway surveyed so far.

At the end of our Marvellous surveying we started out – this was a bit of a problem as where you can see Bob climbing the rock was very unstable. That’s me checking out where he’s putting his feet and hands so that I can get up safely.

1 July – By now Rod & Peter (the cave divers) and Cathi had arrived and the plan was to go KNI151 The Pool for Rod to survey it.  As we walked up the creek, there were lots of Tufa dams (formed when water with calcite in it backs up and the calcite is deposited where it’s dammed up).

1 July – Rod at KNI151 getting set up for tyhe dive.  We were the surface group who carried a lot of the gear in (those dive tanks are very heavy, took Rod a long time to get set up, including setting up a line to follow when he went into the cave (up on the top lh corner).

July 1 – Alison at the pool (Peter, Cathi and Denis in the background).  The pool had a lot of dust floating on it, but apparently the water was very warm.  Rod gave the report “goes North, 40m of passage and at the end it runs into a vertical rift which goes up a dry passage and then runs out”.  So, now we know how much cave there is, Thanks Rod!

2 July – We first surveyed two caves KNI201 and KNI205 and then moved over to KNI206 – we took a caving ladder with us because this cave started with a 3m drop.  This photo shows Rod setting up the anchor for the ladder, then Rod went down, the hole went no-where that was disappointing!

5 July – Surveyed KNI211 (that’s me with the DistoX) then had an early day. (Photo: Cathi H-H)

5 July –  nice formation in KNI211 (photo: Cathi H-H).

July 7 – KNI213 Denis sitting in the sun at the entrance to the cave, this one also had an Olive Python in it, for some unknown reason I chose not to go in this cave – I must have known something there!

7 July – this cave was at ground level (on the flood plain) and there was evidence of first nations habitation here, plus a really, really big Olive Python (about 2m), it was very slow though, looked at us but didn’t seem interested.  Because of the python we didn’t explore any of the passageways.

8 July – we mostly did surface trogging on this day, up on the top of the karst blocks and it was very hot, and dangerous for me because the karst is very sharp, if I fell on it, I’d seriously cut myself.  We did however find some nice grykes (like a canyon) plus one which had a 30m abseil into it – so, these will have to be explored nest year (as we didn’t have ropes or gear with us LOL).

9 July – On this day we checked out a block of karst that was all by itself on the flood plain.  We surveyed it, there wasn’t much to it, but it took a while (Photo:  Cathi H-H that’s me in the pic).

10 July – the day before we had come to a spring-fed pool.  It was about the size of an Olympic pool with a small stream feeding it, then the water apparently went underground.  You don’t come across many pools like this.

We packed up a lot of the equipment on Thursday afternoon, and it took a couple of hours          on Friday (the 11th) to pack up everything else.  By 8.30amwe were ready to head out, sort of sad when you leave the camp and cross the final cattle grid, and I’m never sure whether or not I’ll be fit enough to return the following year, but I’m optimistic.

Big thanks to Bob for organising the whole trip and Denis for your company, it was a great trip, and we saw parts of the country that few Australians would see!