Rodney Campbell's Blog

Lake Argyle is Western Australia’s largest and Australia’s second largest artificial lake by volume. It is part of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme and is located near the East Kimberley town of Kununurra.

The construction of the Ord River Dam was completed in 1971. The dam was officially opened the following year. The dam is 335 metres long, and 98 metres high. The earth-fill only dam wall at Lake Argyle is the most efficient dam in Australia in terms of the ratio of the size of the dam wall to the amount of water stored. The lake was named after the property it partly submerged, Argyle Downs.

There is a nice little lookout right next to the caravan park which looks over the Ord River Dam and this end of Lake Argyle.

Lake Argyle

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 28 mm, 1/30 sec at f/11, ISO 140 x 7 Frames

This is a seven (7) shot handheld pano looking from the lookout.

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

It’s amazing to think that what you see from here is just a vey tiny fraction of the lake and you don’t realise this till you go out on the lake cruise and see how far you go only to look on the map and see again what a tiny part of the overall lake that you’ve covered :)…

I did however spy this nice dead tree right on the cliff edge of the lookout which looked like it might make for some decent foreground interest for some Milky Way action. A little more research with Photo Pills showed we’d face South and get the arch overhead… nice!… I love it when a plan comes together :)…

Light and Shadow

NIKON D750 + 28.0-300.0 mm f/3.5-5.6 @ 98 mm, 1/100 sec at f/8, ISO 250

At normal full supply level the area of the lake formed by the Ord Dam is 980 square kilometres and impounds 10.7 million mega litres (8.6 million acre feet) of water, over 18 times the volume of water contained in Sydney Harbour! If the lake ever does flood to its maximum capacity then the volume will more than triple – Sydney Harbour could be filled more than 70 times!.

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