TheSimpsonDesert 4-11 July 13

Here we are at the end of the crossing of the Simpson Desert. There is no mobile coverage, no landlines of course, no communication at all except satellite phones. We have a sat-phone with us and checked it out at home before we came away. It all worked just fine of course then … but we cannot get it to do anything for us up here. We'd love to get it sorted but we leave tomorrow for the Hay River so there is no time for anything except refuelling the car, buying some fresh food - milk and bread and so on - and trying to clean the camper and the car a bit of all the accumulated mud. So here follows a diary of our 8 days crossing the Simpson Desert, the largest parallel dune system in the world.

4 July 13 Day1

After provisioning in Alice Springs we met our fellow travellers and leader, Wendy aka Misty, in the campsite the evening before we were to leave. We were pleased to see that there were only 6 cars in total making the trip together - too many more would have been a slow and unwieldy group.

We departed Alice Springs in the morning and soon left the blacktop behind. Frist step: reduce the tyre pressures. At first the road wasn't too bad, but some corrugations foretold conditions to come. Eweninga is a small stop with a short walk to a few stony mounds. Petroglyphs of animal tracks and other symbols whose meanings are unknown decorate the flat surfaces of the rocks and are a reminder of the past habitation of the area when Aborigines lived around the adjacent claypan, it often being their source of water.

As the corrugations increased in intensity, it was a relief to stop at Mary Vale Station. Here a shop provided lunch of a pie retrieved from the bottom of a huge chest freezer and heated in a microwave until hot on the outside and distinctly solid still in the middle. From Mary vale, the road continued to deteriorate passing through dry gibber country with the occasional small group of cattle watching us pass with intense curiosity. Chambers Pillar at the end of the dead-end road was shining in the last of the sun as we settled into camp. The pillar is one of the last remnants of sediments laid down 340 million years ago when the whole of the area of this continent was an inland sea. This landmark was noted by the early explorers of the inland and initials and names with dates in the 1800s are carved in the soft sandstone around the base.

5 July 13 Day 2

Because of the aforementioned dead-end nature of the road to Chambers Pillar, it was with no great joy that we retraced the 43 km back to Mary Vale where as some consolation, a peppermint Magnum ice cream made us feel a bit better and ready to continue. Our route was to follow the old Ghan train tracks - though the tracks themselves have all gone. The railway opened up the centre of Australia and work was commenced in 1878 though it was not till 1929 that the line extended to Alice Springs. Along the way are the old settlement and maintenance camps. Old machinery lies around quietly rusting in the dry desert. Old concrete bunkhouses, never pretty in the first place, are roofless shells devoid of doors and windows. The walls are pockmarked and scratched with occasional graffiti. They look like lonely places to live and work.

The road itself actually follows the old line for much of its length. In some places the way is build up and in others there are cuttings through small hills, something that would not be done for a road but was done for a railway line. When the track was decommissioned in 1980, a new line to the west had been completed. The old tracks were torn up and removed. The sleepers still lie strewn along the embankments, quietly rotting away. Also scattered along the road are many railway spikes, used to hold the tracks to the sleepers. Most are harmless but the occasional one pointing upwards can be death to the tyre of an unobservant driver.

Also following the road is the track for the Alice to Finke race. This yearly race for buggies and bikes has its own bulldozed track - the damage to the road would be too much to contemplate! It ends - naturally enough - in Finke, a small aboriginal settlement with a small hospital, a sports ground and a shop with a couple of petrol bowsers. The shop was closed for stocktake…

Again a side track and a dead-end road for our second night's camp. The Lambert Centre is the actual geographic centre of Australia, the place you could balance the continent on a pin if you were so inclined to do so. A flagpole and a plaque mark the spot.

6 July 13 Day3

After a freezing night - the temperature bottomed out at 1.6°C - we tacked the road back into Finke to find the shop open for business. And what a shop! It had everything: food, medicines, toys, clothes, bikes, electronics, motor oil… Ice creams were available as long as you wanted a Paddle Pop. Surprisingly fuel at $2.26/L was cheaper than at Uluru or Kings Canyon where it was $2.33/L. It is hard to imagine that it costs less to send it down hundreds of kilometres of corrugated dirt roads, but then Uluru and Kings Canyon Resorts are both owned by the same corporation and can obviously do what they want!

Now the road was becoming seriously unpleasant. At times the car went into spasms of shuddering and shaking. The corrugations were big enough to lose a favourite pet in. Our speed was correspondingly low with Russ gritting his teeth with his efforts to keep the car in one piece. The countryside changed periodically: one minute a stand of eucalypts, next saltbush and mulga then a stretches of gibber plain with hardly a blade of grass to be seen. The gibber stones can be smooth and shiny - polished - and their surfaces generally red or black. Break one open and it is a different colour inside. Other gibbers were of larger, sharper and more angular rocks. A different view from the window all the time.

The ruins of Charlotte Waters one of 12 repeater stations for the overland telegraph line between Adelaide and Darwin are a sorry site. Opened in 1872 and abandoned in 1930, there is little left but some corrugated iron tanks, a cellar, some foundations, old machinery and a grave. And what a bleak place to live in those times of poor transport and communication.

Our destination and camp for the night was Mt Dare. This is part of a working station but for travellers it is all about the Mt Dare Hotel. As a group we had dinner together in the pub. The menu comprised steak and chips, chicken and chips or fish and chips. Vegetable were available as well as some desserts. There was a choice of Riesling or Riesling if you wanted a bottle of wine and, lo and behold, there were casks of wine for sale. Chateau Cardboard is not sold in the Territory at all, but here we were back in South Australia. The pub was decorated in classic outback style: beer coolers were strung on string, criss-crossing and caps decorated the walls. But one thing was very welcome - hot showers!

7 July 13 Day 4

The road just seemed to keep getting worse each day. Corrugations to loosen every filling in your head, to rattle every screw and nail out of place. After each journey, we opened the camper to find every cupboard open and all contents on the floor. We found jar tops had actually unscrewed and the contents discharged all over the place. Container lids were easily popped off! In the cutlery tray not only did the utensils jump around from section to section, but knives had also been turned around to point the opposite way. Unbelievable!

Dalhousie Ruins were down a winding track. The homestead was built from 1872 and several stone building have been restored including the blacksmith's, part of the main homestead, a bunkhouse and a store. A spring forms a pool at the top of a small rise, not a place you'd expect to find water collecting. While we stood and watched hundreds of Zebra Finches wheeled around settling down to drink and then taking off in a flurry of fright. By 1925 the homestead had been abandoned.

Further on Dalhousie Springs was a complete delight. These warm springs in the middle of dry country are a magnet for travellers. A swim, despite the cold day, was a must. And the water is so deliciously warm, almost hot. Freshwater Dalhousie gobys, only 30mm long, tickle your toes and nibble at your feet. White cockatoos roost in the trees surrounding the spring in their hundreds, crying and squawking and restlessly moving from one tree to another and one branch to another upsetting their neighbours in the process.

A little further on, we settled in to Purni Bore to camp for the night. Here another outlet for the warm (85°C) artesian waters used to pour from the bore. A wetland was created where there was none before. In later times, the bore's discharge has been slowed but some water still maintains the ecosystem that has now come to rely on the presence of the water. Galahs and white cockatoos were prolific and dingoes prowled around the camp, no doubt used to the presence of campers and, more particularly, their left-overs and waste.

8 July 13 Day 5

If the night felt colder than usual, there was a good reason for that: it had got down to 0.8°C overnight. Those in tents were pretty damn chilly! Now we were into dune country. Going from west to east means starting with smaller dunes. As we headed east along the French Line the dunes got progressively larger and the spaces between them wider, many of them with wide flat claypans.

We had heard all along the way from other travellers that the road across the Simpson was very chopped up. People who had crossed in years past using high range had had to travel this year in low range 1st and 2nd gear all the way. The reason for the appalling state of all the tracks is blamed on all the people who buy a 4WD trailer and then think they can take it everywhere. The simple fact is that you can't. Yes they might make it through, but not without damaging the track so badly that it makes it a nightmare for everyone else.

So we lowered our tyre pressures more and more as the dunes rose higher and the tracks became sandier and rougher. Most had dips and holes all the way to the top making a straight run at the track with any speed impossible. Well, only impossible if you want to have your car in one piece at the top. All of us at one stage or another didn't make the top of the dune and so had to roll back and try again.

With reports of the French Line being very damaged, we turned south along the Colson Track, this time running parallel with the dunes giving us an easier run. Another intersection and we turned off the Colson and onto the WAA Line again heading east. Here some particularly gnarly tracks up a dune defeated one of our party and Misty turned back to give them a tow over top. With darkness coming we found a cleared area between dunes on a claypan to camp with a campfire to keep us warm till turning-in time.

9 July 13 Day 6

Overnight it started to rain, gently but persistently. Our claypan was now a mudpan. Sticky, gloopy red mud. All of us plodded around getting the dreadful stuff everywhere, all over clothes, shoes, cars, tents, tarps. All the tents were, of course, very wet and hard to pack up. We felt very happy to have our camper which was generally pretty dry and easy to pack up.

We continued along the WAA Line. We passed far less traffic than we had on the French Line, but when we did it was sometimes not so easy for one party or the other to pull over and let the others past. And ever onward: the dunes continued to get bigger and more challenging. Often reaching the top was not the end of the breath-holding: with the big bonnet in front of you and the car perched at the top of a crest, it was often hard to see just where the track went on the other side. Sometimes left, mostly right or straight ahead, but you could never tell until you were there.

The rain kept steadily falling all day and the cold stayed with us as well. The only consolation was that the rain hardened the track and the sand was not as soft as when dry.

But the rain was also staring to fill up the claypans. The water pooled in depressions and reflected the pearl grey sky. On the clay, the water made the surface shiny and slick. Up close the pools were opaque, red-ochre liquid clay.

At an average speed of about 15 kph, progress was slow, but eventually we reached the end of the WAA Line and we turned north again on the Knolls Track. No fire to look forward to: if we could have found enough firewood, it would all have been too wet to burn anyway. So under makeshift tarp shelters, some of the party cooked dinner in the cold while the rain persistently pattered away. On the other hand, we snugly cooked inside - one of the other was heard to call our camper the Taj Mahal… And while we sleep in our warm bed, two groups are opting to sleep in their cars (in the front seats!) tonight rather than in their sodden tents.

10 July 13 Day 7

After a cold, damp night for everyone, we packed up sodden tents and assorted gear and continued the Knolls Track north. The Knolls Track is named for the Approdinna Attora Knolls, two sizeable hills with hard capping that rise above the desert flats. These are actually gypsum outcrops formed by gypsum swept off local lakes to form high dunes. A hard crust eventually forms which protects the tops from erosion but the environment is rather fragile and these are all that is left apart from small outcrops along the road we were travelling.

The rain had fallen steadily and gently all night and continued throughout most of the day. But there were some benefits. The dry soft sand on the dunes was now packed down firmly and it became much easier to drive up the steep slopes of the dunes. All we had to worry about now was the extremely rough path, the dips and the holes all the way up to the top. Some dune tracks were so badly damaged that driving up the slope was like having the car drive up a series of steep stairs - with one side rising up a step and then the next. The car often rocked side to side quite violently but fortunately we did no damage and survived all the climbs unscathed.

But the hard claypans in the interdune spaces had collected water and often the road was a slushy mud puddle. We were soon carrying a lot of extra weight in mud under the car and in the wheel arches. Soon we were covered in the mud too.

Poepple Corner, the intersection of Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory is marked by a plaque on a concrete plinth and obviously worth a quick look … not much else to see though and we headed north out of South Australia back into the Northern Territory skirting the edge of a dry claypan till we struck out across the pan into Queensland. Now we were travelling the QAA line directly to Big Red and Birdsville under clearing skies.

11 July 13 Day 8

The clouds had disappeared overnight but the morning dew was as heavy on us all as the rain. Everything was still pretty wet! As we drove due east, the dunes got bigger and bigger and the spaces between them widened all the time. Every interdune space was different. Here were gidgee trees, with black trunks and dark grey-green foliage, there were saltbush flats or spinifex. Other areas of dry creek beds grew coolabah eucalypts in grey clay; yet other had fast growing acacias in yellow bloom. The dunes themselves were yellow sand or deep red. The red dunes are older as they have accumulated the red dust over long periods of time. In the morning the dunes were hard and damp but as the day wore on, the top surface was drying out and the soft sand was beginning to assert itself again.

At the end was Big Red, the last sand dune before the road to Birdsville and the highest dune in the Simpson topping 40 metres in height, a formidable challenge to ascend. For many, getting over Big Red, particularly in one go, is the 'big thing' to do. But Big Red has defeated many and broken many cars in the process. There are 4 tracks up - from the impossible unless you have a modified vehicle to the chicken track. We picked one of the easier ones, not wishing to damage the car unnecessarily just to say we had done a hard track. But when we got to the top we couldn't see some of the others who had gone up a different track. So we turned to drive across the dune and up a rise … to be confronted with what looked like an almost vertical slope dropping away under us (looking at it later, the slope was about 60°). Russ engaged 1st gear low range and went for it! Was a bit scary…

And so the big challenge done it was a smooth gravel road all the way into Birdsville. A most welcome drink at the Birdsville Hotel was followed by a hot shower at the campground and we joined our fellow travellers at the pub for a farewell dinner. It has been a great group - everyone, without exception, has been a pleasure to travel with.

But we only have one night here and then we plunge back into the desert for the second part of our desert adventure with a new group.