An hour before dawn, the French rose from their swags and started chattering away in full, daytime voices: apparently a group unclear on the concept of Other People. They were mostly kids, with a couple adults, a man and a woman. I couldn't understand much of what he said, but the man seemed to be performing a pre-sunrise stand-up routine, judging by the periodic bursts of youth laughter that erupted each time he paused.
Chris and Krystal were in their tent nearby, closer to the French. Chris unzipped their tent door and stuck his head out. I heard him ask, in a friendly voice, "so where are you folks from?" The answer came back, "France," and Chris replied, "Right, so I'll be sure I never go to fucking France, and in the meantime do you think you could keep it down, some people are still trying to sleep." They whispered for a few minutes, but then forgot or couldn't help themselves or didn't care and lapsed again into loud conservation and laughter.
Not that I was too bothered. After fourteen nights sleeping out I had become rather more easy going than usual.
In two weeks we walked about 250 kilometers, across rolling red plains grown up with witchetty bush and mulga, and along dry river washes dotted with big white gum trees; we passed through numerous red rock gorges, deep and rugged, boulder hopping past small green waterholes and ancient cycads; we made steep climbs up to and down from the windy mountain heights, walking always westwards on open rocky ridges with far views in all directions. We spotted the occasional hill kangaroo, watched rock wallabies at twilight at waterholes in the gorges, listened to dingoes howling in the night and ravens in the mornings croaking in resigned complaint. We met other hikers, like Chris and Krystal, and stopped to talk about the trail and weather and food and campsites and where we were from. We lived out of our backpacks, ate muesli with hot water in the mornings, various dehydrated dinners at night, which seemed to taste better and better as we went along. We slept out some nights, but most nights in the tent, always with the fly off. The nights were cold, but not too bad, though there was ice in the water bottles that one morning. The moon was full to start, a bare crescent by the end, and every night I saw shooting stars....
After the early morning French wake-up call, I rose and went inside the nearby main building. I sat on a couch to write in my notebook, and soon Chris and Krystal appeared, as did the French, who sat down at a large table for tea. Chris was annoyed to see them--if they weren't leaving early, why the early and noisy start?
We had arranged a ride into town the day before, with a couple who works for West MacDonnell National Park (which we had mostly been in since leaving Alice). We'd met David and Carey at Redbank, and Rachael had discovered they were going into town today and would be happy to give us a ride.
At nine they rolled up in their '75 sky blue Combi--a VW camper van--with small trailer behind. We thought they were coming later, so I had to break down the tent in a hurry and quickly pack my pack. Soon Rachael and I were in the backseat, Chris and Krystal too, heading east towards Alice Springs at a strangely rapid pace.
Carey turned in her seat and chatted with us, clearly happy for the company. She was an attractive woman with short gray hair and blue eyes, probably in her mid fifties; David had the barrel chest of a man of the same age, and a thick moustache and bushy head of iron gray hair. He also had the calm and confident demeanor of a man who can fix things; later I learned that he was modifying another old VW van, a pick-up style sort, to manage rough dirt roads; also, he'd owned a motorcycle shop on the east coast in the 1970s and 1980s. As we drove, Carey told us much about the Combi (the term for VW camper vans in Australia), which was immaculate and all original and obviously much beloved. They had bought it six years earlier, from the original owner (who had put just 70,000 kilometers on it), put a new engine in, replaced a few faded pieces, like the curtains and seat covers, and set out on the road. They'd been all over Australia, including across to and around Tasmania.
They had recently settled in Central Australia to work for a few months as Park Managers. They oversaw three campgrounds (and lived in housing at one), visiting each one each day to clean up and to maybe chat with the campers. On the way to town, we gave them some assistance at one, Ellery Creek (where Rachael and I had camped--and picked up one of our food drops--around day six of the walk). Chris took a shovel and trash can and cleaned ash out of the fire pits. David cleaned the gas barbeques (a regular feature at Australian campgrounds, as grilling is a national obsession). Rachael and Krystal did the woman's bathroom, while I helped Carey with the men's. She was quite fastidious, but my work passed inspection. I hadn't really considered the possibility of cleaning public toilets as part of my Australian experience, but I was happy to do it. When the toilets were done, we got down together on our hands and knees and scrubbed the dollops of bird shit off of the stone floor, chatting as we worked.
We got dropped off in town, after the 130 kilometer drive, and walked the last kilometer or so out to Rachael's house. I immediately unloaded my pack and we started a load of laundry. My few items of clothing were impressively filthy after two weeks of desert walking. I'd been able to rinse out shirts and underwear and socks a couple times along the way, but it hadn't done much other than make me feel a bit better for the attempt. We took turns taking showers, and a hard-earned shower is a large pleasure.
Later we walked into town for groceries. For dinner we were joined by one of Rachael's colleagues, Gai, who'd been staying at the house while we were gone. Rachael made a salad (fresh vegetables!) and baked potatoes, and she grilled kangaroo steaks for Gai and I. Interesting, but maybe a little bland. The package label said that kangaroo meat is very healthy--98% fat free--and as kangaroos don't produce methane, they are much easier on the environment than cattle and sheep.
Rachael works at the Alukura Women's Center, which is part of a larger organization, the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, which is aboriginal-led but employs many white people. Her job title is Maternal and Child Health Coordinator. Gai is a research consultant who Rachael hired to conduct a study of aboriginal women's attitudes and ideas about health services. The health situation for aboriginal people here is quite dire, and Rachael's trying to find ways of improving services. The people live in "town camps" in horrific third world conditions; alcoholism and domestic abuse and violence are rampant, as are acute illnesses such as diabetes.
(Today's newspaper headline is about a death in a camp near Rachael's house: a man's body was found last week by children going to school. He had been half consumed by dogs, but authorities are not yet sure whether the dogs killed him or ate him after he was dead. There's a two-dog per household limit in the community, but it's not enforced. Plus, there's not much difference between owned dogs and feral dogs, which are attracted to the camps by the trash and food scattered about. Though they have houses, many of the aboriginal people live--and cook and eat--almost entirely outside.)
Gai is asking the women two sets of questions. The first is about their ideas concerning mothering, fathering, and the role of extended family in child rearing; the second addresses their feelings about the intensive nurse home visit program, which all interviewees have been participating in. Once she's gathered her findings, Gai will write a report for Alukura.
Until recently Gai was a professor of Health Sciences at Latrobe University in Melbourne. At the university, she worked in the Australian Institute of Primary Care, which is an important center for national health evaluation and policy development. She was being groomed to be the next director when she decided she didn't really want to continue in that direction, and would rather do field work. She's a slight woman, about fifty, and was dressed in professional attire, black pants, grey blouse. She pushed her hair back on each side repeatedly as she spoke, telling me about her work, about the health situation in the Northern Territory. I found her a remarkably intelligent and articulate person. When we spoke about my work, she asked very good questions.
Her husband is the head of the literature department at Melbourne University, one of the top two schools in Australia. He's currently on leave and writing a book about 18th and 19th century versions of virtual reality. His sister is partnered with Joan Nestle (a noted pioneer of Lesbian scholarship), whom he secured a position at his university.
She and Rachael spent much of the post-prandial conversation discussing conditions at their shared workplace, which at the moment are rather difficult and dramatic.... I listened with interest, until dead-tired where I sat, I had to excuse myself for bed.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Up Mt. Sonder in the dark
On no night on the trail did I sleep right through. I usually woke repeatedly, after a few initial hours of uninterrupted sleep. I would lie on my back and watch the stars, or note the progress of the moon, listen to the cold night, then roll onto my side and soon doze off again. Sleep, wake, back and side, not frustrated (after the first couple days) but patient with the long dark.
I was hard asleep, though, when my watch alarm went off at four the last morning of the walk. Rachael and I had talked from the start of the Larapinta about making the Mt. Sonder ascent early, for the sunrise; we had spoken to others along the trail about the climb, always asking when they'd gone up. Some had left early in the dark, like we planned, and they all raved; others laughed and said, no, they had slept to a decent hour and hiked up in the light of day.
Rachael's cellphone alarm went off too, and after thinking for five minutes about how warm I was in my bag and how cold it would be outside, I sat up and unzipped the side door of the tent and climbed out into the chill and pitch black. In just a few minutes we were stumbling up the rocky wash, looking for where the narrow trail led off to the right.
The first portion of the eight-kilometer climb was the toughest, the path a jumble of big stones, and steep enough that you had to put a hand on your knee with each upward step. I had a headlamp, but Rachael did not have a light (nor did she have her contacts in). I pointed my headlamp straight down, and she walked right behind me; we tried to match our pace, so I didn't leave her in darkness, she didn't tread on my heels. My limited vision proved disconcerting at first, impairing my sense of equilibrium. I could see ahead only two or three feet, a distance I would cover in a step, a second of time, while what lay just beyond remained in absolute darkness. It was like walking in a long land dark closet, the floor covered with stones rather than shoes, while a strong crosswind swept out of the blackness. And while I figured I could trust the trail, I couldn't see that it didn't lead over a cliff two steps ahead. An odd sensation, moving forward yet unable to see ahead, and I put one foot in front of another more tentatively than usual.
After the first initial climb, the trail moderated, but continued upwards on a long ridge, rising in big chunks to one false peak after another. Not that I could tell we were on a ridge. I could sort of feel it, but really I had no sense of my surroundings, beyond the path and rocks within the small scope of my headlamp. Overhead two swathes of the Milky Way cut across a dark sky filled with stars. After we'd been on the trail for an hour, a red crescent moon rose above the horizon to the northeast, a bare sliver, companionable but providing no discernible light. We stopped and huddled close together, and somehow in the wind Rachael managed to put in her contacts.
At the first hint of light in the east we paused and I checked the watch: 6:20, and we still had two kilometers to go. Sharing the single light, we'd had to move a bit slow, but now we increased the pace. Before long, we didn't need the lamp in the early gloaming, and I surged ahead on a steep slope where the path was paved with large flat stones. I came up to a saddle and discovered a whole other peak to climb, the last one. I set off faster still, determined to make the top in time. The eastern sky turned red, the few clouds overhead orange. I settled into a trot, fell back into a walk when my breathing became labored. The last part of the trail led up through close-packed mallee bushes, and I couldn't see the eastern horizon. I began running, falling back into a walk for short stretches to recover; but I didn't pause to rest, figuring every minute counted. And anyway I felt strong, I felt up to this last and highest climb. Finally, at just after seven, and heaving huge ragged breaths, I came out on top. I was in time.
A stone and cement cairn marked the summit, and I sat down in its lee to shelter from the strong wind. A few minutes later Rachael appeared and said, "I was running."
After the rushing, we had ten minutes to spare before the sun rose over the Chewings Range in the east. In these moments I felt intensely happy, exhilarated with the combined bliss of a lovely sunrise, a high mountaintop, and a long walk completed.
Beside the cairn, Rachael heated water for our morning tea and muesli, and the muesli was the best I've ever eaten. I pulled a register from a slot in the cairn and we wrote our names in the book. We spun all around naming the mountains and features of the surrounding land, Mt. Zeil and Mt. Razorback and Mt. Giles, Gosse Bluff, and others; we could pick out some of our campsites of recent days, off to the west. I felt overwhelmed, ecstatic. The land about infatuated me; in the last two weeks I'd seen much of it close up, but I was left wanting more and more.
On the way down, I moved slowly, stopping often to admire the view, to savor the last few kilometers of hiking. Just below the summit I came upon a pair of Euros (hill kangaroos). They went darting off down a brushy defile, moving with amazing easy, hopping smoothly from rock to rock, using only their paired and powerful back feet for locomotion, and for balance their thick tails. Under the morning sun the path was a revelation. I kept stopping to turn around and look back up, trying to match the long ridge to the earlier walk up in darkness.
Halfway down I passed a group of hikers, the same group we'd seen at Counts Point days before. I knew them by the wild gray and wavy hair of one of the women, tanned and fit and in her sixties. They were accompanied by their guide, Shane, who later in the day would do us a great favor.
Back at camp, I took down the tent, and we loaded up our packs. At the nearby watertank I came upon Tony and Jac and Mike, who we'd met at Ormiston, and who had just arrived at Redbank after camping at Rocky Gap the night before. After Ormiston they had detoured to Glen Helen for a night of beers and steaks.
As we were talking, a young woman came up from her campsite in the wash to fill a water bottle. This proved to be Clare, of Sven and Clare, an Australian couple that I had never met but whose names I had seen repeatedly in the log books found at the start/end of each of the trail's twelve sections. Clare was young, in her mid-twenties, dark-haired, squarish in shape, and wearing long shorts and a tank top. She and Sven had been ahead of Rachael and me all along, and had been camped at Redbank for a couple days. I like the name Clare, and I had been imagining someone amiable and good-humored; but the actual Clare was superior and skeptical. She assumed the role of veteran and expert, treating us as if we were less seasoned and of questionable reliability.
She asked about several of the Larapinta's side trails, its extras. "Did you walk down to the Ochre Pits?" she asked Tony (near Serpentine Chalet Dam).
"No," Tony admitted, "we reckoned we could see those on the drive back, if we wanted" (the pits are near Namatijira Drive).
"Oh," said Clare, loading the single word with both disappointment and disapproval. She let it hang in the air for a moment. "Well," she finally said, "yes, I suppose you could see the pits that way. But it's the trail down that's really beautiful. Too bad you missed it."
She asked me if I'd walked the High Route, an alternative route, way back between Jay Creek and Standley Chasm. I told her no, I hadn't. That had been one of our longer, tougher days, and we saw no need to add in more climbing.
"Oh," Clare said, pursing her lips. Again the disapproving silence. "Too bad," she said, unsmiling, "that was a really beautiful stretch. Sven and I really liked it. We thought it was one of the best parts of the whole trail. Amazing views. Amazing. A shame that you missed it."
I just nodded, annoyed. And so it went, Clare naming parts of the trail, and seeming disappointed and yet also pleased when we hadn't done something she and Sven had.
"Did you go up to the real peak this morning?" she asked me. The "real" peak? I didn't understand, but said, yes, we'd been to the top. But she persisted, and eventually I understood that there's a second peak, a few feet higher than the one we'd been on. In the past people had climbed out to the other peak, but a narrow connecting ridge had crumbled away, and it's become too dangerous. "Sven did it," Clare, said, "he's done it a few times."
Clare and Sven had claimed the best campsite in the wash, but they were leaving in a couple hours. "We're going off trail, north up over the ridge, towards Mt. Zeil. Sven's been out there before, but we don't know if we'll find enough water. But, you know, we'll figure it out."
Tony asked Clare if they could put their packs over by her campsite, since they'd like to take it after she and Sven were gone. Clare hesitated, clearly not liking the idea. "I'd have to ask Sven," she said. Tony laughed, thinking she was joking. But just then Sven, tall and lanky and bearded and monosyllabic, came up. She did ask him. He grunted his assent with poor grace, and then went to the watertank to fill his bottle, not bothering to say anything else to any of us.
Tony went off with Clare to put his pack at the site, while Mike and Jac and I went up to the covered picnic tables at the carpark. Clare commenced a monologue on her and especially Sven's accomplishments, and it was a long time before Tony could join us for lunch.
Rachael was at the carpark, and had already asked a few people about a possible ride out to Glen Helen. No takers yet, but we still had hope.
Through much of the hot afternoon we sat in the shade at the picnic tables, eating nearly the last of our food and talking with Mike and Jac and Tony. I discovered, or inferred, that Tony is a pilot with Qantas. Mike showed us his broken down boots again, and said, "I'm going to have some words with them," "them" being the people at the store who had recommended the boots. Jac said that for the next trip he would prefer to go fishing; the two older men seemed happy and satisfied with their hike, but Jac never really took to it. Chris and Krystal joined us, after returning from a later morning climb up Sonder. Occasionally, an SUV would appear, and people would get out and hike up Redbank Gorge to the pool. Most of the vehicles were too packed with gear to allow for extra passengers.
The group of hikers led by Shane appeared and loaded into his Land Rover, which had long benches in the back. He had one extra seat, but we needed two, four actually, since Chris and Krystal also were hoping for Glen Helen. But then Shane said he'd come back for us in a couple hours, after he dropped off the others.
When Shane returned, he clambered easily to the top of his truck and we handed up our packs, which he strapped down. He's a wiry, dark-skinned man with dreads, soft-spoken and not prone to smiling though friendly. He owns the small guiding company, Trek Larapinta, and spends most of his days on the trail; he leads six, nine, and twenty day trips. Rachael sat in front with Shane as we bumped down the rough road. They have several mutual friends in Alice, and she talked about her sister Helen coming up from Melbourne to do the trail with his company. He said the current group had been challenging, but didn't elaborate. He also said that he tried not to memorize the trail, and that he liked showing people the MacDonnells. He lit up, in his subdued way, when describing non-commercial backpacking trips he'd taken, in particular, out to and up Mt. Giles. I felt some envy for the life he led.
At Glen Helen, Chris gave Shane twenty dollars for gas, though Shane didn't want it and tried to give it back; my sense was that he considered the ride a favor, a gesture of friendship, and the money changed that; but Rachael disagreed, saying it was fine, it just paid for the extra gas to come back for us, so I decided not to worry.
Glen Helen stood beside the road, on a flat just beside a high wall of red rock. It's what they call in Central Australia a "resort," though the word seems too fancy for the ramshackle all-in-one operation, one that reminded me of places you find on remote portions of the Alaska Highway. It consisted of a main building with reception, bar, and dining room, a gravel lot with hook-ups for caravans, a nearby stretch of grass for tents, a separate building with expensive but crappy motel rooms, and another section with wall tents, most often occupied by large tour groups. The resort was busy, apparently attracting all the travelers in the area, which is not surprise considering there's no other such place for quite some distance around.
At Glen Helen you could also have a helicopter ride; a pilot was on-site, ready to take up one or two people for twenty or forty-minute flights over the mountains and gorges (Chris and Krystal would go up the next morning, as a birthday present for Krystal; she was thrilled. Chris was quite good at making her happy). Glen Helen gorge, with a pool, was just a couple hundred yards down from the main building.
Inside the low and long and stuccoed main building, beside the bar, was an ice cream cooler, and first off Rachael bought us each a bar. She and I sat out back, looking at the red wall. I sighed, enjoying my chocolate and vanilla ice cream, glad for the semblance of civilization, but sad too to have left the trail.
Eventually we set up our tent and had showers at the nearby shower building. Rachael and I walked down to the gorge and looked at the pool. A couple, a young man and woman, came climbing down from the rock cliff on one side. The man was the helicopter pilot, in his late twenties, tall, with a goatee, originally from Wales. The woman was a bit younger, a barmaid at the resort, blonde, just a little pudgy. They both wore jeans. He had talked her into going up the ragged cliff; he was at his ease clambering about the rocks, she wasn't, but she appeared glad of his attention. She watched the pilot with a sarcastic and worshipful expression, wary and infatuated both. He didn't look at her, but kept her at his side, aware that he was being watched.
Rachael asked the young woman how she liked working at Glen Helen. "There's not much to do," she said.
The pilot put in, "there's lots," gesturing at the land.
"But you've been gone the last week," she said, with a bit of a pout. "The rest of them, they just play video games."
After dark, Rachael and I went to the bar and drank two short glasses of beer, Toohey's, and it tasted wonderful. The Trek Larapinta group gathered around a pool table, laughing and drinking and looking quite contented on their last night.
At the campground, a large group of French people had arrived in a tour bus. They gathered around a fire, talking loudly and not seeming at all interested in their swags thrown down on the ground nearby. But I fell easily to sleep nonetheless, and for a change slept nearly through the night.
I was hard asleep, though, when my watch alarm went off at four the last morning of the walk. Rachael and I had talked from the start of the Larapinta about making the Mt. Sonder ascent early, for the sunrise; we had spoken to others along the trail about the climb, always asking when they'd gone up. Some had left early in the dark, like we planned, and they all raved; others laughed and said, no, they had slept to a decent hour and hiked up in the light of day.
Rachael's cellphone alarm went off too, and after thinking for five minutes about how warm I was in my bag and how cold it would be outside, I sat up and unzipped the side door of the tent and climbed out into the chill and pitch black. In just a few minutes we were stumbling up the rocky wash, looking for where the narrow trail led off to the right.
The first portion of the eight-kilometer climb was the toughest, the path a jumble of big stones, and steep enough that you had to put a hand on your knee with each upward step. I had a headlamp, but Rachael did not have a light (nor did she have her contacts in). I pointed my headlamp straight down, and she walked right behind me; we tried to match our pace, so I didn't leave her in darkness, she didn't tread on my heels. My limited vision proved disconcerting at first, impairing my sense of equilibrium. I could see ahead only two or three feet, a distance I would cover in a step, a second of time, while what lay just beyond remained in absolute darkness. It was like walking in a long land dark closet, the floor covered with stones rather than shoes, while a strong crosswind swept out of the blackness. And while I figured I could trust the trail, I couldn't see that it didn't lead over a cliff two steps ahead. An odd sensation, moving forward yet unable to see ahead, and I put one foot in front of another more tentatively than usual.
After the first initial climb, the trail moderated, but continued upwards on a long ridge, rising in big chunks to one false peak after another. Not that I could tell we were on a ridge. I could sort of feel it, but really I had no sense of my surroundings, beyond the path and rocks within the small scope of my headlamp. Overhead two swathes of the Milky Way cut across a dark sky filled with stars. After we'd been on the trail for an hour, a red crescent moon rose above the horizon to the northeast, a bare sliver, companionable but providing no discernible light. We stopped and huddled close together, and somehow in the wind Rachael managed to put in her contacts.
At the first hint of light in the east we paused and I checked the watch: 6:20, and we still had two kilometers to go. Sharing the single light, we'd had to move a bit slow, but now we increased the pace. Before long, we didn't need the lamp in the early gloaming, and I surged ahead on a steep slope where the path was paved with large flat stones. I came up to a saddle and discovered a whole other peak to climb, the last one. I set off faster still, determined to make the top in time. The eastern sky turned red, the few clouds overhead orange. I settled into a trot, fell back into a walk when my breathing became labored. The last part of the trail led up through close-packed mallee bushes, and I couldn't see the eastern horizon. I began running, falling back into a walk for short stretches to recover; but I didn't pause to rest, figuring every minute counted. And anyway I felt strong, I felt up to this last and highest climb. Finally, at just after seven, and heaving huge ragged breaths, I came out on top. I was in time.
A stone and cement cairn marked the summit, and I sat down in its lee to shelter from the strong wind. A few minutes later Rachael appeared and said, "I was running."
After the rushing, we had ten minutes to spare before the sun rose over the Chewings Range in the east. In these moments I felt intensely happy, exhilarated with the combined bliss of a lovely sunrise, a high mountaintop, and a long walk completed.
Beside the cairn, Rachael heated water for our morning tea and muesli, and the muesli was the best I've ever eaten. I pulled a register from a slot in the cairn and we wrote our names in the book. We spun all around naming the mountains and features of the surrounding land, Mt. Zeil and Mt. Razorback and Mt. Giles, Gosse Bluff, and others; we could pick out some of our campsites of recent days, off to the west. I felt overwhelmed, ecstatic. The land about infatuated me; in the last two weeks I'd seen much of it close up, but I was left wanting more and more.
On the way down, I moved slowly, stopping often to admire the view, to savor the last few kilometers of hiking. Just below the summit I came upon a pair of Euros (hill kangaroos). They went darting off down a brushy defile, moving with amazing easy, hopping smoothly from rock to rock, using only their paired and powerful back feet for locomotion, and for balance their thick tails. Under the morning sun the path was a revelation. I kept stopping to turn around and look back up, trying to match the long ridge to the earlier walk up in darkness.
Halfway down I passed a group of hikers, the same group we'd seen at Counts Point days before. I knew them by the wild gray and wavy hair of one of the women, tanned and fit and in her sixties. They were accompanied by their guide, Shane, who later in the day would do us a great favor.
Back at camp, I took down the tent, and we loaded up our packs. At the nearby watertank I came upon Tony and Jac and Mike, who we'd met at Ormiston, and who had just arrived at Redbank after camping at Rocky Gap the night before. After Ormiston they had detoured to Glen Helen for a night of beers and steaks.
As we were talking, a young woman came up from her campsite in the wash to fill a water bottle. This proved to be Clare, of Sven and Clare, an Australian couple that I had never met but whose names I had seen repeatedly in the log books found at the start/end of each of the trail's twelve sections. Clare was young, in her mid-twenties, dark-haired, squarish in shape, and wearing long shorts and a tank top. She and Sven had been ahead of Rachael and me all along, and had been camped at Redbank for a couple days. I like the name Clare, and I had been imagining someone amiable and good-humored; but the actual Clare was superior and skeptical. She assumed the role of veteran and expert, treating us as if we were less seasoned and of questionable reliability.
She asked about several of the Larapinta's side trails, its extras. "Did you walk down to the Ochre Pits?" she asked Tony (near Serpentine Chalet Dam).
"No," Tony admitted, "we reckoned we could see those on the drive back, if we wanted" (the pits are near Namatijira Drive).
"Oh," said Clare, loading the single word with both disappointment and disapproval. She let it hang in the air for a moment. "Well," she finally said, "yes, I suppose you could see the pits that way. But it's the trail down that's really beautiful. Too bad you missed it."
She asked me if I'd walked the High Route, an alternative route, way back between Jay Creek and Standley Chasm. I told her no, I hadn't. That had been one of our longer, tougher days, and we saw no need to add in more climbing.
"Oh," Clare said, pursing her lips. Again the disapproving silence. "Too bad," she said, unsmiling, "that was a really beautiful stretch. Sven and I really liked it. We thought it was one of the best parts of the whole trail. Amazing views. Amazing. A shame that you missed it."
I just nodded, annoyed. And so it went, Clare naming parts of the trail, and seeming disappointed and yet also pleased when we hadn't done something she and Sven had.
"Did you go up to the real peak this morning?" she asked me. The "real" peak? I didn't understand, but said, yes, we'd been to the top. But she persisted, and eventually I understood that there's a second peak, a few feet higher than the one we'd been on. In the past people had climbed out to the other peak, but a narrow connecting ridge had crumbled away, and it's become too dangerous. "Sven did it," Clare, said, "he's done it a few times."
Clare and Sven had claimed the best campsite in the wash, but they were leaving in a couple hours. "We're going off trail, north up over the ridge, towards Mt. Zeil. Sven's been out there before, but we don't know if we'll find enough water. But, you know, we'll figure it out."
Tony asked Clare if they could put their packs over by her campsite, since they'd like to take it after she and Sven were gone. Clare hesitated, clearly not liking the idea. "I'd have to ask Sven," she said. Tony laughed, thinking she was joking. But just then Sven, tall and lanky and bearded and monosyllabic, came up. She did ask him. He grunted his assent with poor grace, and then went to the watertank to fill his bottle, not bothering to say anything else to any of us.
Tony went off with Clare to put his pack at the site, while Mike and Jac and I went up to the covered picnic tables at the carpark. Clare commenced a monologue on her and especially Sven's accomplishments, and it was a long time before Tony could join us for lunch.
Rachael was at the carpark, and had already asked a few people about a possible ride out to Glen Helen. No takers yet, but we still had hope.
Through much of the hot afternoon we sat in the shade at the picnic tables, eating nearly the last of our food and talking with Mike and Jac and Tony. I discovered, or inferred, that Tony is a pilot with Qantas. Mike showed us his broken down boots again, and said, "I'm going to have some words with them," "them" being the people at the store who had recommended the boots. Jac said that for the next trip he would prefer to go fishing; the two older men seemed happy and satisfied with their hike, but Jac never really took to it. Chris and Krystal joined us, after returning from a later morning climb up Sonder. Occasionally, an SUV would appear, and people would get out and hike up Redbank Gorge to the pool. Most of the vehicles were too packed with gear to allow for extra passengers.
The group of hikers led by Shane appeared and loaded into his Land Rover, which had long benches in the back. He had one extra seat, but we needed two, four actually, since Chris and Krystal also were hoping for Glen Helen. But then Shane said he'd come back for us in a couple hours, after he dropped off the others.
When Shane returned, he clambered easily to the top of his truck and we handed up our packs, which he strapped down. He's a wiry, dark-skinned man with dreads, soft-spoken and not prone to smiling though friendly. He owns the small guiding company, Trek Larapinta, and spends most of his days on the trail; he leads six, nine, and twenty day trips. Rachael sat in front with Shane as we bumped down the rough road. They have several mutual friends in Alice, and she talked about her sister Helen coming up from Melbourne to do the trail with his company. He said the current group had been challenging, but didn't elaborate. He also said that he tried not to memorize the trail, and that he liked showing people the MacDonnells. He lit up, in his subdued way, when describing non-commercial backpacking trips he'd taken, in particular, out to and up Mt. Giles. I felt some envy for the life he led.
At Glen Helen, Chris gave Shane twenty dollars for gas, though Shane didn't want it and tried to give it back; my sense was that he considered the ride a favor, a gesture of friendship, and the money changed that; but Rachael disagreed, saying it was fine, it just paid for the extra gas to come back for us, so I decided not to worry.
Glen Helen stood beside the road, on a flat just beside a high wall of red rock. It's what they call in Central Australia a "resort," though the word seems too fancy for the ramshackle all-in-one operation, one that reminded me of places you find on remote portions of the Alaska Highway. It consisted of a main building with reception, bar, and dining room, a gravel lot with hook-ups for caravans, a nearby stretch of grass for tents, a separate building with expensive but crappy motel rooms, and another section with wall tents, most often occupied by large tour groups. The resort was busy, apparently attracting all the travelers in the area, which is not surprise considering there's no other such place for quite some distance around.
At Glen Helen you could also have a helicopter ride; a pilot was on-site, ready to take up one or two people for twenty or forty-minute flights over the mountains and gorges (Chris and Krystal would go up the next morning, as a birthday present for Krystal; she was thrilled. Chris was quite good at making her happy). Glen Helen gorge, with a pool, was just a couple hundred yards down from the main building.
Inside the low and long and stuccoed main building, beside the bar, was an ice cream cooler, and first off Rachael bought us each a bar. She and I sat out back, looking at the red wall. I sighed, enjoying my chocolate and vanilla ice cream, glad for the semblance of civilization, but sad too to have left the trail.
Eventually we set up our tent and had showers at the nearby shower building. Rachael and I walked down to the gorge and looked at the pool. A couple, a young man and woman, came climbing down from the rock cliff on one side. The man was the helicopter pilot, in his late twenties, tall, with a goatee, originally from Wales. The woman was a bit younger, a barmaid at the resort, blonde, just a little pudgy. They both wore jeans. He had talked her into going up the ragged cliff; he was at his ease clambering about the rocks, she wasn't, but she appeared glad of his attention. She watched the pilot with a sarcastic and worshipful expression, wary and infatuated both. He didn't look at her, but kept her at his side, aware that he was being watched.
Rachael asked the young woman how she liked working at Glen Helen. "There's not much to do," she said.
The pilot put in, "there's lots," gesturing at the land.
"But you've been gone the last week," she said, with a bit of a pout. "The rest of them, they just play video games."
After dark, Rachael and I went to the bar and drank two short glasses of beer, Toohey's, and it tasted wonderful. The Trek Larapinta group gathered around a pool table, laughing and drinking and looking quite contented on their last night.
At the campground, a large group of French people had arrived in a tour bus. They gathered around a fire, talking loudly and not seeming at all interested in their swags thrown down on the ground nearby. But I fell easily to sleep nonetheless, and for a change slept nearly through the night.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Redbank Gorge
I rose early and went off by myself to the eastern side of Hilltop. A cold morning, with an unusually strong wind blowing. I'd put on all my clothes--long underwear under my shorts, a t-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, down sweater and light jacket, gloves and neck gaiter and wool cap too. I sat on a large pink rock and watched the light change and grow, the sun rise and change everything.
Back at camp, Rachael couldn't get the fire started in the fierce wind, which seemed to be strengthening. We could barely talk or stand, and so decided to head down and have our breakfast somewhere below. Rachael left first; I set off fifteen minutes later, after getting my gear packed.
Just a short way below the ridgetop the wind began to abate. I picked my way slowly down the steep and open rocky slope, enjoying the descent, the view of Mt. Sonder, which loomed ahead. Down at the bottom, the trail led into a plain sparsely grown with mulga trees. I stopped often to look back, ahead, all around. I was feeling good, that nearly-the-end-of-the-trip good, a sort of wistful nostalgia for what's not quite finished but almost. I slowed down and paused often to savor the walk and the land, the mountains and rocks and scanty trees and red dirt.
After four or five kilometers I reached Rocky Gap, a short and wide canyon, and passed through to the south side of the ridge. In the gap I met three hikers (after seeing no one on the trail yesterday), and we said hello but didn't stop. They were just starting their hike, and I mused in a paternal fashion over their inexperience and the miles and pleasures that lay ahead of them.
On the far side of the gap, beside a small water tank, Rachael was waiting for me to show up with the stove. She boiled water for tea and to pour over the muesli (to which she also added a couple spoonfuls of dried milk). We sat in the dirt in the sun, and I ate the warm muesli from my purple bowl, drank the tea from my green tin mug. Afterwards, I did the dishes.
We reached Redbank Gorge early in the afternoon, and, after filling our bottles at the watertank (the slowest spigot on the trail, little more than a drip), climbed a short hill to the carpark to have lunch at a covered picnic table. A rough dirt road comes into Redbank, from Namatijira Drive, and soon after we arrived, two older couples from Sydney, traveling together but in separate SUVs, appeared and joined us at the picnic table. One of the men was small, compact and fit, with a huge white moustache. When he learned we had walked from Alice Springs, he shook both our hands. When his wife and the other couple came up, he gestured at us and said, "These two have walked all the way from Alice." He seemed proud of our accomplishment.
The other man, largish, a bit sloppy, Hardy to his friend's Laurel, used our walk as a prompt to name other trails in other parts of Australia. I don't think he had walked many of them, though; he seemed more of a reader about trails than a walker of them. Soon he turned his attention to another form of transportation, for some reason telling us several airline anecdotes, and giving particular attention to types of aircraft, their characteristics and advantages and safety records. The five of us sat silently listening to the man talk about a topic that only he apparently much cared about. Some people, like Rachael, are good at starting and nurturing conversation; others, such as this man, are conversation killers, wielding the monologue to often deadly effect.
After lunch we walked a half-mile up Redbank Gorge, up the bouldery, narrowing canyon and out of the sunlight to where a large dark pool blocked further travel. One could swim to the far side and squeeze through the narrow cut to continue up canyon, but a wetsuit might be in order. We sat down on a large, water-smoothed outcropping, and after a moment, a rock wallaby came down the cliff on the far side to have a drink at the pool's edge. On the other side a crow perched in a small ghost gum tree jutting from the cliff; it gave a few echoey, disconsolate croaks then fell silent. No other sound could be heard in the shaded recess, and I felt compelled to whisper, then to fall silent myself. In the gloomy canyon my morning giddiness gave way to melancholy. Soon the two couples appeared, whispering among themselves, and sat down nearby; they too fell silent.
We sat for some time, quiet, watching the wallaby, which stood by the water, moved back from the edge, moved back to the water; it seemed in no rush. Lost in my own thoughts, at first I didn't notice that the large man was whispering at me. Finally, he whispered louder, and I turned to look at him. They were going, and he said, "I'll leave you to your harmony." I nodded and smiled. Funny that he needed to interrupt that supposed harmony in order to let me know he was leaving me to it.
We camped in the wash, downstream near the water tanks. A couple other tents were up already, and Chris and Krystal had of course shown up too. They went up a bit, we went down and cast about for some time for a likely spot, which we had an unusually difficult time finding. But finally we picked a spot, in the sand, in the open. I put up a tent, using stones to hold down the pegs, while Rachael made a fire ring and a fire. For dinner, she warmed Indian food, something spinach-y first, then lentils. Two courses instead of our usual one. We used a forked stick to heat pieces of roti--which were indistinguishable from tortillas--over the fire. Chris and Krystal were camped too far away, several hundred yards, and we remained at our separate sites.
I read a Tolstoy story, tilting the book towards the fire to take advantage of the light. "Too Dear" was about how the rulers of tiny Monaco could't figure out how to execute a convicted murderer, as they had no system in place for dealing with such malefactors. No one in Monaco wanted to execute the man, and the French and Italians would've charged too much for the job; His sentence was commuted, but then it was discovered it cost too much to keep him in prison indefinitely. In the in the end, the King of Monaco grants the murderer a small annuity and sends him across the border into France, where he buys a bit of land, starts market-gardening, and lives comfortably.
We took to the tent at nine, and lay comfortably ourselves in our sand-cushioned sleeping bags. I'd set my watch alarm for four am, when we planned to somehow rise and set off on the last stretch of the Larapinta.
Back at camp, Rachael couldn't get the fire started in the fierce wind, which seemed to be strengthening. We could barely talk or stand, and so decided to head down and have our breakfast somewhere below. Rachael left first; I set off fifteen minutes later, after getting my gear packed.
Just a short way below the ridgetop the wind began to abate. I picked my way slowly down the steep and open rocky slope, enjoying the descent, the view of Mt. Sonder, which loomed ahead. Down at the bottom, the trail led into a plain sparsely grown with mulga trees. I stopped often to look back, ahead, all around. I was feeling good, that nearly-the-end-of-the-trip good, a sort of wistful nostalgia for what's not quite finished but almost. I slowed down and paused often to savor the walk and the land, the mountains and rocks and scanty trees and red dirt.
After four or five kilometers I reached Rocky Gap, a short and wide canyon, and passed through to the south side of the ridge. In the gap I met three hikers (after seeing no one on the trail yesterday), and we said hello but didn't stop. They were just starting their hike, and I mused in a paternal fashion over their inexperience and the miles and pleasures that lay ahead of them.
On the far side of the gap, beside a small water tank, Rachael was waiting for me to show up with the stove. She boiled water for tea and to pour over the muesli (to which she also added a couple spoonfuls of dried milk). We sat in the dirt in the sun, and I ate the warm muesli from my purple bowl, drank the tea from my green tin mug. Afterwards, I did the dishes.
We reached Redbank Gorge early in the afternoon, and, after filling our bottles at the watertank (the slowest spigot on the trail, little more than a drip), climbed a short hill to the carpark to have lunch at a covered picnic table. A rough dirt road comes into Redbank, from Namatijira Drive, and soon after we arrived, two older couples from Sydney, traveling together but in separate SUVs, appeared and joined us at the picnic table. One of the men was small, compact and fit, with a huge white moustache. When he learned we had walked from Alice Springs, he shook both our hands. When his wife and the other couple came up, he gestured at us and said, "These two have walked all the way from Alice." He seemed proud of our accomplishment.
The other man, largish, a bit sloppy, Hardy to his friend's Laurel, used our walk as a prompt to name other trails in other parts of Australia. I don't think he had walked many of them, though; he seemed more of a reader about trails than a walker of them. Soon he turned his attention to another form of transportation, for some reason telling us several airline anecdotes, and giving particular attention to types of aircraft, their characteristics and advantages and safety records. The five of us sat silently listening to the man talk about a topic that only he apparently much cared about. Some people, like Rachael, are good at starting and nurturing conversation; others, such as this man, are conversation killers, wielding the monologue to often deadly effect.
After lunch we walked a half-mile up Redbank Gorge, up the bouldery, narrowing canyon and out of the sunlight to where a large dark pool blocked further travel. One could swim to the far side and squeeze through the narrow cut to continue up canyon, but a wetsuit might be in order. We sat down on a large, water-smoothed outcropping, and after a moment, a rock wallaby came down the cliff on the far side to have a drink at the pool's edge. On the other side a crow perched in a small ghost gum tree jutting from the cliff; it gave a few echoey, disconsolate croaks then fell silent. No other sound could be heard in the shaded recess, and I felt compelled to whisper, then to fall silent myself. In the gloomy canyon my morning giddiness gave way to melancholy. Soon the two couples appeared, whispering among themselves, and sat down nearby; they too fell silent.
We sat for some time, quiet, watching the wallaby, which stood by the water, moved back from the edge, moved back to the water; it seemed in no rush. Lost in my own thoughts, at first I didn't notice that the large man was whispering at me. Finally, he whispered louder, and I turned to look at him. They were going, and he said, "I'll leave you to your harmony." I nodded and smiled. Funny that he needed to interrupt that supposed harmony in order to let me know he was leaving me to it.
We camped in the wash, downstream near the water tanks. A couple other tents were up already, and Chris and Krystal had of course shown up too. They went up a bit, we went down and cast about for some time for a likely spot, which we had an unusually difficult time finding. But finally we picked a spot, in the sand, in the open. I put up a tent, using stones to hold down the pegs, while Rachael made a fire ring and a fire. For dinner, she warmed Indian food, something spinach-y first, then lentils. Two courses instead of our usual one. We used a forked stick to heat pieces of roti--which were indistinguishable from tortillas--over the fire. Chris and Krystal were camped too far away, several hundred yards, and we remained at our separate sites.
I read a Tolstoy story, tilting the book towards the fire to take advantage of the light. "Too Dear" was about how the rulers of tiny Monaco could't figure out how to execute a convicted murderer, as they had no system in place for dealing with such malefactors. No one in Monaco wanted to execute the man, and the French and Italians would've charged too much for the job; His sentence was commuted, but then it was discovered it cost too much to keep him in prison indefinitely. In the in the end, the King of Monaco grants the murderer a small annuity and sends him across the border into France, where he buys a bit of land, starts market-gardening, and lives comfortably.
We took to the tent at nine, and lay comfortably ourselves in our sand-cushioned sleeping bags. I'd set my watch alarm for four am, when we planned to somehow rise and set off on the last stretch of the Larapinta.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Can You dig it / Yes, I can
After an hour's walk, Rachael and I took our first rest on top of a rock-strewn hill, sitting near the hill's single tree, a lanky gum. For some reason I'd been talking about the Galapagos. I said that everything must've changed in the thirty years since I'd been in the islands. I'd been on a sailboat with my family, and though we only had permission from the Ecuadorian authorities to stay three days, somehow we managed to sneak around undetected for three weeks. We made first landfall at Stephens Bay on San Cristobal Island. At sunset a small school of dolphins had escorted us in, swimming under the bowsprit for a stretch; we saw seals too and a hammerhead shark. The bare land sloped up from the shore black and volcanic. In the morning we went ashore in the Zodiac, riding in on the waves and landing at one of the few sandy spots. The hot, buggy island had felt strange and primordial. I'd walked along the black shore collecting the pale purple "arms" of shattered sea anemones, which I later made into a series of ugly necklaces and bracelets.
For another hour Rachael and I continued through low, spinifex-covered hills. According to the map, "Spinifex is prolific in Central Australia because it can survive on very low levels of nitrogen and phosphorus." These grasses can be sorted into two types, hard and soft; hard is most prominent on the trail. "It is almost impossible to put your hand into a tussock of hard spinifex." Yes, true.
The path brought us down out of the hills onto the broad flat on either side of the wide Finke River. The Western Arrernte Aboriginal name for the Finke, "Lherepirnte," meaning salty river, is the source of the trail's name. The river is supposedly one of the oldest in the world, part of its bed dating back 400 million years. It's also one of the longest in Australia (a continent with rather modest rivers), starting in the MacDonnells and winding southwards for about 750 kilometers. However, it's worth pointing out that the Finke is only a "river" in the Central Australian sense--meaning it's mostly a long sandbox for big gum trees, dotted with a few small waterholes, the remnants of intermittent flash floods.
The windless day had grown hot, probably up in the eighties. We lunched at a newish, covered shelter, sitting on one of its two large sleeping platforms; between the platforms was a cabinet to store one's food. Fancy.
We crossed the sandy river, passed through a small gum tree woodland like nothing else I'd seen on the trail, and soon came to a side trail that led a half dozen kilometers to Glen Helen. Up until our first morning stop, we had been considering a side trip to Glen Helen, for ice cream bars mainly--a banana paddle pop for Rachael--and also to camp for the night. However, we decided to stay on the trail and wait a couple more days for cold treats.
Our trail plans had changed repeatedly over the last days. When we had started the trip, Rachael had hoped to add a three-day side hike from Ormiston Gorge: out across the Pound, to the foot of and then up Mt. Giles, before returning to the gorge and the Larapinta. But, after much indecision, we had decided to forego this side trip. We would finish a bit earlier, our thinking went, so as to have more time in Alice before I had to fly out to Melbourne.
Beyond the Finke, we turned west then northwest, heading back towards the high ridge of the Heavitree Range. More spinifex, lots of witchetty bush and mulgas too. Walking alone, I turned to song to beguile the hot afternoon hours. I often sang on the trail, though only when alone. My repertoire was limited, and often I could only recall portions of songs, but nonetheless I much enjoyed my solo performances. Bruce of course played an important part in my singing, in particular his "Reason to Believe" and "Thunder Road" (for some reason the only two of his songs I could remember in their entirety). "Reason to Believe," as last year in Spain, was my favorite, and I sang it more than once each day, often experimenting with different styles and cadences and accents.
Besides Bruce, I relied on my elementary school years, a time from which my brain is apparently better able to retain lyrics. In first and second grade with Miss Weakley, I had daily sung a trilogy of patriotic songs, which I reprised while walking: "The Star-Spangled Banner," "My Country 'Tis of Thee," and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Actually I could only remember the first verses of the last two, but I always liked belting out "Glory, glory Hallelujah" and I still do.
Other songs from my later youth in the seventies would arise from memory too: "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night ("Jeremiah was a bullfrog, Was a good friend of mine...."), "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf ("I like smoke and lightning, Heavy metal thunder, Racin' with the wee-nd, And the feelin' that I'm un-der"), and most of all, for some reason, maybe because it's a good walking song, Chicago's "Saturday in the Park." Ambling along through the spinifex, I'd sing, "Saturday in the park, I think it was the fourth of July"; then, setting the scene: "People dancing, people laughing, A man selling ice cream, Singing Italian songs." Next I'd ask a question: "Can you dig it," and follow up with the answer: "yes, I can." Finally I would become wistful: "And I've been waiting such a long time, For Saturday." After that verse, I could only recall bits, such as "people talking, really smiling" and "slow motion riders," and again, "Can you dig it, Yes, I can." It's funny how really satisfying this song could be.
A couple hours after lunch we reached the foot of the ridge and started a long, steep climb. The two-kilometer ascent was one of the toughest on the whole trail, and it would've wiped me out a week or ten days before. And I was soon breathing hard and moving slowly, but I kept moving upwards with only rare pauses, feeling a sort of giddy pleasure in the challenge. Once on top I stopped for only a moment to take in the long view before heading westwards on the crest, upwards still but on a more gentle gradient; I barely noticed my pack, and I made big fast strides, feeling as if I could fly along.
Soon I reached Hilltop, the high point of the ridge, marked by a large stone cairn. The crest was a backbone of stony ground, with half-burnt mallee bushes scattered about. I collected small pieces of firewood and piled them by the cairn, where previous hikers had built a fire. Other hikers had also cleared a few small tent sites, and I cast about looking for the most comfortable; the one I settled on didn't quite accommodate our tent, so I enlarged it, tossing the stones to the side.
Rachael soon arrived, and then just before sunset Chris and Krystal. They had planned to camp at Glen Helen, but I wasn't surprised when they showed up; for the last week we had, usually without discussion, made many of the same decisions about the trail and campsites. Chris asked me, "Capper, what's the second best tent spot?", a harmless question probably, but I felt maybe I'd been selfish. We all paused in our camp duties to watch the sun set behind Mt. Sonder, which looked markedly closer and was; two more short days on the trail and we'd be at its peak.
After she started the fire, Rachael made freeze-dried vegetarian pasta for dinner, an entree she said was distinctive for its "sickly tomato taste." But I liked it. Chris and Krystal cooked on the fire, heating up water for their own freeze-dried meal--something with lamb--as well as a pan of "deb" (fake mashed potatoes). The wind came up, blowing flames and sparks about.
After we ate, I asked Chris and Krystal if they wanted to hear a Tolstoy story. Chris seemed hesitant, but only a little. I chose "The Empty Drum," which turned out to be the worst story in the book--a nonsensical and repetitious tale about a peasant who marries a sprite turned beautiful woman, and a king who covets the wife and so tries to get rid of the peasant by setting him a series of dangerous, difficult tasks, that the peasant successfully completes with the help of his magic wife. It's a story best enjoyed as a single sentence, such as the previous one.
Rachael made hot chocolate, and Krystal brought out a bag of marshmallows, a treat from their last food drop. We used sticks to cook them over the fire, and I made a few even though I don't like marshmallows. Chris claimed he made the perfect marshmallow, but even his wife was skeptical--until she tried one of his creations. He managed, she said, to produce a marshmallow with a firm, chewy skin but a completely melted interior. He made one for Rachael and she too was won over. Only I declined, mostly because I was feeling sick from too many marshmallows. But he clearly really wanted me to have this wonderful experience--Chris enjoyed his prowess most when he could share it with others--and eventually I gave in. Indeed, it was perfect, at least if you like that sort of thing.
Krystal soon said she was exhausted--in Chris's words, "she's lost the plot"-- and we were all off to our tents by nine. I lay on my back and watched shooting stars fall across the windy night sky.
For another hour Rachael and I continued through low, spinifex-covered hills. According to the map, "Spinifex is prolific in Central Australia because it can survive on very low levels of nitrogen and phosphorus." These grasses can be sorted into two types, hard and soft; hard is most prominent on the trail. "It is almost impossible to put your hand into a tussock of hard spinifex." Yes, true.
The path brought us down out of the hills onto the broad flat on either side of the wide Finke River. The Western Arrernte Aboriginal name for the Finke, "Lherepirnte," meaning salty river, is the source of the trail's name. The river is supposedly one of the oldest in the world, part of its bed dating back 400 million years. It's also one of the longest in Australia (a continent with rather modest rivers), starting in the MacDonnells and winding southwards for about 750 kilometers. However, it's worth pointing out that the Finke is only a "river" in the Central Australian sense--meaning it's mostly a long sandbox for big gum trees, dotted with a few small waterholes, the remnants of intermittent flash floods.
The windless day had grown hot, probably up in the eighties. We lunched at a newish, covered shelter, sitting on one of its two large sleeping platforms; between the platforms was a cabinet to store one's food. Fancy.
We crossed the sandy river, passed through a small gum tree woodland like nothing else I'd seen on the trail, and soon came to a side trail that led a half dozen kilometers to Glen Helen. Up until our first morning stop, we had been considering a side trip to Glen Helen, for ice cream bars mainly--a banana paddle pop for Rachael--and also to camp for the night. However, we decided to stay on the trail and wait a couple more days for cold treats.
Our trail plans had changed repeatedly over the last days. When we had started the trip, Rachael had hoped to add a three-day side hike from Ormiston Gorge: out across the Pound, to the foot of and then up Mt. Giles, before returning to the gorge and the Larapinta. But, after much indecision, we had decided to forego this side trip. We would finish a bit earlier, our thinking went, so as to have more time in Alice before I had to fly out to Melbourne.
Beyond the Finke, we turned west then northwest, heading back towards the high ridge of the Heavitree Range. More spinifex, lots of witchetty bush and mulgas too. Walking alone, I turned to song to beguile the hot afternoon hours. I often sang on the trail, though only when alone. My repertoire was limited, and often I could only recall portions of songs, but nonetheless I much enjoyed my solo performances. Bruce of course played an important part in my singing, in particular his "Reason to Believe" and "Thunder Road" (for some reason the only two of his songs I could remember in their entirety). "Reason to Believe," as last year in Spain, was my favorite, and I sang it more than once each day, often experimenting with different styles and cadences and accents.
Besides Bruce, I relied on my elementary school years, a time from which my brain is apparently better able to retain lyrics. In first and second grade with Miss Weakley, I had daily sung a trilogy of patriotic songs, which I reprised while walking: "The Star-Spangled Banner," "My Country 'Tis of Thee," and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Actually I could only remember the first verses of the last two, but I always liked belting out "Glory, glory Hallelujah" and I still do.
Other songs from my later youth in the seventies would arise from memory too: "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night ("Jeremiah was a bullfrog, Was a good friend of mine...."), "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf ("I like smoke and lightning, Heavy metal thunder, Racin' with the wee-nd, And the feelin' that I'm un-der"), and most of all, for some reason, maybe because it's a good walking song, Chicago's "Saturday in the Park." Ambling along through the spinifex, I'd sing, "Saturday in the park, I think it was the fourth of July"; then, setting the scene: "People dancing, people laughing, A man selling ice cream, Singing Italian songs." Next I'd ask a question: "Can you dig it," and follow up with the answer: "yes, I can." Finally I would become wistful: "And I've been waiting such a long time, For Saturday." After that verse, I could only recall bits, such as "people talking, really smiling" and "slow motion riders," and again, "Can you dig it, Yes, I can." It's funny how really satisfying this song could be.
A couple hours after lunch we reached the foot of the ridge and started a long, steep climb. The two-kilometer ascent was one of the toughest on the whole trail, and it would've wiped me out a week or ten days before. And I was soon breathing hard and moving slowly, but I kept moving upwards with only rare pauses, feeling a sort of giddy pleasure in the challenge. Once on top I stopped for only a moment to take in the long view before heading westwards on the crest, upwards still but on a more gentle gradient; I barely noticed my pack, and I made big fast strides, feeling as if I could fly along.
Soon I reached Hilltop, the high point of the ridge, marked by a large stone cairn. The crest was a backbone of stony ground, with half-burnt mallee bushes scattered about. I collected small pieces of firewood and piled them by the cairn, where previous hikers had built a fire. Other hikers had also cleared a few small tent sites, and I cast about looking for the most comfortable; the one I settled on didn't quite accommodate our tent, so I enlarged it, tossing the stones to the side.
Rachael soon arrived, and then just before sunset Chris and Krystal. They had planned to camp at Glen Helen, but I wasn't surprised when they showed up; for the last week we had, usually without discussion, made many of the same decisions about the trail and campsites. Chris asked me, "Capper, what's the second best tent spot?", a harmless question probably, but I felt maybe I'd been selfish. We all paused in our camp duties to watch the sun set behind Mt. Sonder, which looked markedly closer and was; two more short days on the trail and we'd be at its peak.
After she started the fire, Rachael made freeze-dried vegetarian pasta for dinner, an entree she said was distinctive for its "sickly tomato taste." But I liked it. Chris and Krystal cooked on the fire, heating up water for their own freeze-dried meal--something with lamb--as well as a pan of "deb" (fake mashed potatoes). The wind came up, blowing flames and sparks about.
After we ate, I asked Chris and Krystal if they wanted to hear a Tolstoy story. Chris seemed hesitant, but only a little. I chose "The Empty Drum," which turned out to be the worst story in the book--a nonsensical and repetitious tale about a peasant who marries a sprite turned beautiful woman, and a king who covets the wife and so tries to get rid of the peasant by setting him a series of dangerous, difficult tasks, that the peasant successfully completes with the help of his magic wife. It's a story best enjoyed as a single sentence, such as the previous one.
Rachael made hot chocolate, and Krystal brought out a bag of marshmallows, a treat from their last food drop. We used sticks to cook them over the fire, and I made a few even though I don't like marshmallows. Chris claimed he made the perfect marshmallow, but even his wife was skeptical--until she tried one of his creations. He managed, she said, to produce a marshmallow with a firm, chewy skin but a completely melted interior. He made one for Rachael and she too was won over. Only I declined, mostly because I was feeling sick from too many marshmallows. But he clearly really wanted me to have this wonderful experience--Chris enjoyed his prowess most when he could share it with others--and eventually I gave in. Indeed, it was perfect, at least if you like that sort of thing.
Krystal soon said she was exhausted--in Chris's words, "she's lost the plot"-- and we were all off to our tents by nine. I lay on my back and watched shooting stars fall across the windy night sky.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
I like Tony and Mike and Jac, especially Tony
In the morning we sat on the outcropping with our muesli and tea and waited for the sun to rise. The eastern sky lightened slowly from pink to pale yellow. A few small birds began to sing in the stillness, and from a ghost gum downslope a single raven gave voice to what sounded like querulous disappointment. The sun broke the horizon in a dip in the Chewings Range, lighting our faces first, before its light slid slowly downhill towards Ormiston Pound.
The path soon descended from the ridge, and we walked a dozen morning kilometers to Ormiston Gorge, maybe the largest canyon on the trail and certainly the most visited. A side road from Namatijira Road brings in tourists, some out for the day from Alice Springs, some staying in nearby Glen Helen, and many camping in small RVs and SUVs. In the bathroom I looked in a mirror for the first time in a week and thought I looked strange.
Chris and Krystal were already at the small visitor center building, going through their food drop box. Chris asked if I wanted a piece of white chocolate, and when I said I did, he said, "Alright, but this is my very favorite treat, and you have to eat it just as I say." He broke off a healthy chunk from a large foil-wrapped bar. "You have to slowly suck it, to get the full flavor," he instructed; "no chewing." He waited for me to show a sign of agreement before handing over the chocolate. The thing with Chris was that he always knew the best way to do something, and even if he was right--and he usually was--I sometimes wanted to resist. I went around a corner to a set of benches on the side of the building and chewed my white chocolate, and it was still pretty good.
When Rachael arrived we retrieved our own food box, the last of the hike, and took it to a nearby covered picnic table. While we ate lunch--crackers with cheese, wasabe peas, boxed fruit juice--a tour group arrived and joined us at the large table. One loud woman said, "It's hot here, but not as hot as back home right now. We're from New England." I found her American accent jarring but pleasing and just a little exotic.
Hikers had a separate campground at Ormiston, with wooden platforms and gas grills; the sites were close together, the dirt pulverized by much traffic into a powdery dust that leapt up with each footfall. Bower birds, drab-colored but with a spot of bright pink on the back of their heads, nervously pecked at the ground, then scattered to the bushes that dotted the sites. Crows lingered on the margins waiting for the main chance. In the afternoon, they got at a few things we'd left out, leaving large beak holes in an orange juice box, and ripping to shreds a bag of dried fruit they'd pulled from an open pocket of Rachael's pack.
I had gone off to walk into the gorge, a deep and twisting canyon a mile or so long, with a shrinking waterhole at its mouth;pale sand surrounded the pool, but beyond the wide bottom of the canyon was filled with boulders and, emerging from the foot of the walls, water-smoothed slabs of stone. At the far end one could continue out into the Pound, but instead I returned to the waterhole and sat down in the shade of a gum tree and read.
Later, I had a shower in the small green shower building near the campground. The hot water lasted only the first minute or so, and yet the experience was still transformative, coming after eleven days on the trail. I emerged back out into the sunlight feeling completely different. Cleanliness can be overrated, but wait long enough and there are few more dramatically pleasurable sensations.
In the afternoon, other hikers arrived at the campground, including Ian and Beatta, a Norwegian couple who had started at the Larapinta's west end. After a couple days, Ian was disappointed with the trail, which he had expected to be more rugged and challenging. "It is like walking on ash-falt to go to McDonald's," he said, straight-faced. We assured him that he would be better pleased as he progressed eastwards. (Once we had walked the part of the trail he had just covered, I decided that his characterization, while colorful, was inaccurate; there were easy stretches, yes, but a couple substantial ascents and descents as well).
Ian and Beatta had been in Australia for just a month or so, and they planned on staying a year. They had bought an SUV and a caravan (trailer), and started in the north. They planned to go everywhere, but they hadn't known about the Larapinta until reaching Alice Springs. Once they learned of the trail, they purchased packs and sleeping bags at the Lone Dingo in Alice; still, some of the equipment in their huge packs was more appropriate to the road than the trail, including a full-sized sauce pan they used to make oatmeal at our grill the next morning. It doesn't sound like much, but to see a backpacker with such an item was startling.
Ian's English was nearly perfect, and only slightly accented. Six or seven years ago he had completed his nurse's training in Adelaide, before returning to Norway to work. At moments, an Australian accent briefly replaced the Scandinavian; for "nice" he said "noice," just like a good Aussie. Beatta had worked as a kindergarten teacher in Norway, and her English wasn't quite as good; she seemed to understand well enough, but occasionally she could speak whole sentences of which I understood not a word (Rachael later backed me up on this). Already, though, she was picking up Australian phrasing, for example sprinkling her conversation with "I reckons," a common sentence starter, and the equivalent of the U.S. "I figure" (as in "I reckon we'll take fifteen days to get to Alice Springs"). Ian was rather serious, maybe a little overbearing; Beatta was shy, but laughed often, with a surprisingly loud and staccato bray.
At dusk Rachael and I walked down to the pool in the gorge, and watched a couple rock wallabies come down out of the canyon's rugged cliffsides. A German couple appeared too, and took about five thousand photographs of one of the wallabies as it sat nicely posed on a low slab of rock. Someone on a canyonside trail a couple hundred feet above the pool threw down a stone, which just missed a white-necked heron standing on the shore.
Back at camp Rachael made a fire in the communal fire pit near our site. Ian joined her, offering advice about how to arrange the wood, and clearly wanting to do it himself; but Rachael politely if firmly retained control. However, for the first time on the trip, her fire-making did not result in immediate success, and Ian took advantage of this opening to sidle in and take charge.
Rachael had invited to the fire others at the campground, including three men who had shown up late in the day. Also, Laura, one of the chocolate-less women we had met on the trail a four or five days before. She had left her companions for some reason and hitchhiked back alone, and was now camped in the dry riverbed nearby; Rachael had talked to her earlier, and Laura had said she planned to take mushrooms that night, so she'd probably stay at her own camp. Which apparently she did; we didn't see her at the fire. Chris and Krystal were absent too, having hitched a ride to nearby Glen Helen to eat steaks.
The three men, though, did soon join us, Mike and Tony, both in their fifties, and Jac, Tony's twenty-two-year-old son. I had noted earlier that they all carried massive packs, and each had his own tent, though Tony's appeared large enough to accommodate all three. They too were traveling west; they had left Alice Springs two days after us.
Tony and Jac were from Brisbane, but Tony's accent was more British, and both spoke in what Rachael identified as the posh and confident tones of the public-school educated (public meaning what Americans call private). Jac mentioned that his younger sister was currently at a boarding school in Geelong.
Tony had grown up in Ethiopia and Malaysia, where his father was a planter. He had ended up in Hong Kong, where he had raised his own family until the British handed the city over to the Chinese in the mid-1990s; then they had moved to Brisbane. He was a tall and ruggedly handsome man, with striking blue-gray eyes and a friendly and appealing demeanor. When the talk turned to deserts, he mentioned golfing in Palm Springs, and he wore a cap advertising Whistler (a ski resort in British Columbia)—both of which confirmed my sense that he was well-off and long had been.
Jac had been at uni for a couple years, studying commerce, when he'd become bored and bolted for Europe, somewhat to his parents' dismay. Eventually he had landed in Edinburgh, where for the last two years he had managed a pub. Just this summer his parents had talked him into returning to Australia, and he would soon be starting back at school. Though also tall and fit, he must've taken more after his mother, since he was darker than his father, with a much smaller face and a somewhat beetled brow; he had a couple weeks' beard, while the two older men had shaved earlier in the shower building. He occasionally took small pulls from a silver flask
Mike was a search-and-rescue helicoptor pilot, and he lived in Newcastle. Of the three the he was designated raconteur; often one of the other two would start an anecdote but then hand it off to him. He and Tony had been close friends since their young days in the Royal Navy together (and Tony's other son had just finished his training with the Royal Commandos, or some such group). Mike told a joking but painful story about his new boots, which had both fallen apart on the trail and carved serious wounds in his feet. He was deprecating and cheerful about his hike—in the breezy, affable style of the Anglo adventurer—but he must've suffered terribly, judging from the numerous bandages on his feet, which he showed us.
Jac's own stories were all about drinking, and though I might have been projecting, it seemed to me that Tony listened with a rather forced smile. In one story, set in Brisbane, Jac was out drinking at a club, met some people, went back to their apartment to continue the festivities, then came out onto the street at dawn; still half-drunk, he discovered he had no idea where he was. Much emphasis was put on this confusion, the point of the story really, the ridiculous fact that he could get lost in his own home city, that's how drunk he had been. He had ended up calling his mother for help, while he stumbled down the early morning street. She had been initially flustered, not understanding how he could be so lost; but eventually she told him to go to the nearest corner and name the cross-streets, which she looked up online and then directed him home.
In the midst of the talk, Rachael made hot chocolate, then poured in each mug a dollop of brandy (a food box treat). Jac declined a mug, holding up his flask to show that he was all set. Ian put more wood on the fire, and Tony turned the conversation away from Jac's drinking exploits by asking Beatta and Ian about their plans. I wanted, though, to hear more about Tony, who I felt particularly drawn to. But soon after he and Mike and Jac excused themselves and went off to their tents.
The path soon descended from the ridge, and we walked a dozen morning kilometers to Ormiston Gorge, maybe the largest canyon on the trail and certainly the most visited. A side road from Namatijira Road brings in tourists, some out for the day from Alice Springs, some staying in nearby Glen Helen, and many camping in small RVs and SUVs. In the bathroom I looked in a mirror for the first time in a week and thought I looked strange.
Chris and Krystal were already at the small visitor center building, going through their food drop box. Chris asked if I wanted a piece of white chocolate, and when I said I did, he said, "Alright, but this is my very favorite treat, and you have to eat it just as I say." He broke off a healthy chunk from a large foil-wrapped bar. "You have to slowly suck it, to get the full flavor," he instructed; "no chewing." He waited for me to show a sign of agreement before handing over the chocolate. The thing with Chris was that he always knew the best way to do something, and even if he was right--and he usually was--I sometimes wanted to resist. I went around a corner to a set of benches on the side of the building and chewed my white chocolate, and it was still pretty good.
When Rachael arrived we retrieved our own food box, the last of the hike, and took it to a nearby covered picnic table. While we ate lunch--crackers with cheese, wasabe peas, boxed fruit juice--a tour group arrived and joined us at the large table. One loud woman said, "It's hot here, but not as hot as back home right now. We're from New England." I found her American accent jarring but pleasing and just a little exotic.
Hikers had a separate campground at Ormiston, with wooden platforms and gas grills; the sites were close together, the dirt pulverized by much traffic into a powdery dust that leapt up with each footfall. Bower birds, drab-colored but with a spot of bright pink on the back of their heads, nervously pecked at the ground, then scattered to the bushes that dotted the sites. Crows lingered on the margins waiting for the main chance. In the afternoon, they got at a few things we'd left out, leaving large beak holes in an orange juice box, and ripping to shreds a bag of dried fruit they'd pulled from an open pocket of Rachael's pack.
I had gone off to walk into the gorge, a deep and twisting canyon a mile or so long, with a shrinking waterhole at its mouth;pale sand surrounded the pool, but beyond the wide bottom of the canyon was filled with boulders and, emerging from the foot of the walls, water-smoothed slabs of stone. At the far end one could continue out into the Pound, but instead I returned to the waterhole and sat down in the shade of a gum tree and read.
Later, I had a shower in the small green shower building near the campground. The hot water lasted only the first minute or so, and yet the experience was still transformative, coming after eleven days on the trail. I emerged back out into the sunlight feeling completely different. Cleanliness can be overrated, but wait long enough and there are few more dramatically pleasurable sensations.
In the afternoon, other hikers arrived at the campground, including Ian and Beatta, a Norwegian couple who had started at the Larapinta's west end. After a couple days, Ian was disappointed with the trail, which he had expected to be more rugged and challenging. "It is like walking on ash-falt to go to McDonald's," he said, straight-faced. We assured him that he would be better pleased as he progressed eastwards. (Once we had walked the part of the trail he had just covered, I decided that his characterization, while colorful, was inaccurate; there were easy stretches, yes, but a couple substantial ascents and descents as well).
Ian and Beatta had been in Australia for just a month or so, and they planned on staying a year. They had bought an SUV and a caravan (trailer), and started in the north. They planned to go everywhere, but they hadn't known about the Larapinta until reaching Alice Springs. Once they learned of the trail, they purchased packs and sleeping bags at the Lone Dingo in Alice; still, some of the equipment in their huge packs was more appropriate to the road than the trail, including a full-sized sauce pan they used to make oatmeal at our grill the next morning. It doesn't sound like much, but to see a backpacker with such an item was startling.
Ian's English was nearly perfect, and only slightly accented. Six or seven years ago he had completed his nurse's training in Adelaide, before returning to Norway to work. At moments, an Australian accent briefly replaced the Scandinavian; for "nice" he said "noice," just like a good Aussie. Beatta had worked as a kindergarten teacher in Norway, and her English wasn't quite as good; she seemed to understand well enough, but occasionally she could speak whole sentences of which I understood not a word (Rachael later backed me up on this). Already, though, she was picking up Australian phrasing, for example sprinkling her conversation with "I reckons," a common sentence starter, and the equivalent of the U.S. "I figure" (as in "I reckon we'll take fifteen days to get to Alice Springs"). Ian was rather serious, maybe a little overbearing; Beatta was shy, but laughed often, with a surprisingly loud and staccato bray.
At dusk Rachael and I walked down to the pool in the gorge, and watched a couple rock wallabies come down out of the canyon's rugged cliffsides. A German couple appeared too, and took about five thousand photographs of one of the wallabies as it sat nicely posed on a low slab of rock. Someone on a canyonside trail a couple hundred feet above the pool threw down a stone, which just missed a white-necked heron standing on the shore.
Back at camp Rachael made a fire in the communal fire pit near our site. Ian joined her, offering advice about how to arrange the wood, and clearly wanting to do it himself; but Rachael politely if firmly retained control. However, for the first time on the trip, her fire-making did not result in immediate success, and Ian took advantage of this opening to sidle in and take charge.
Rachael had invited to the fire others at the campground, including three men who had shown up late in the day. Also, Laura, one of the chocolate-less women we had met on the trail a four or five days before. She had left her companions for some reason and hitchhiked back alone, and was now camped in the dry riverbed nearby; Rachael had talked to her earlier, and Laura had said she planned to take mushrooms that night, so she'd probably stay at her own camp. Which apparently she did; we didn't see her at the fire. Chris and Krystal were absent too, having hitched a ride to nearby Glen Helen to eat steaks.
The three men, though, did soon join us, Mike and Tony, both in their fifties, and Jac, Tony's twenty-two-year-old son. I had noted earlier that they all carried massive packs, and each had his own tent, though Tony's appeared large enough to accommodate all three. They too were traveling west; they had left Alice Springs two days after us.
Tony and Jac were from Brisbane, but Tony's accent was more British, and both spoke in what Rachael identified as the posh and confident tones of the public-school educated (public meaning what Americans call private). Jac mentioned that his younger sister was currently at a boarding school in Geelong.
Tony had grown up in Ethiopia and Malaysia, where his father was a planter. He had ended up in Hong Kong, where he had raised his own family until the British handed the city over to the Chinese in the mid-1990s; then they had moved to Brisbane. He was a tall and ruggedly handsome man, with striking blue-gray eyes and a friendly and appealing demeanor. When the talk turned to deserts, he mentioned golfing in Palm Springs, and he wore a cap advertising Whistler (a ski resort in British Columbia)—both of which confirmed my sense that he was well-off and long had been.
Jac had been at uni for a couple years, studying commerce, when he'd become bored and bolted for Europe, somewhat to his parents' dismay. Eventually he had landed in Edinburgh, where for the last two years he had managed a pub. Just this summer his parents had talked him into returning to Australia, and he would soon be starting back at school. Though also tall and fit, he must've taken more after his mother, since he was darker than his father, with a much smaller face and a somewhat beetled brow; he had a couple weeks' beard, while the two older men had shaved earlier in the shower building. He occasionally took small pulls from a silver flask
Mike was a search-and-rescue helicoptor pilot, and he lived in Newcastle. Of the three the he was designated raconteur; often one of the other two would start an anecdote but then hand it off to him. He and Tony had been close friends since their young days in the Royal Navy together (and Tony's other son had just finished his training with the Royal Commandos, or some such group). Mike told a joking but painful story about his new boots, which had both fallen apart on the trail and carved serious wounds in his feet. He was deprecating and cheerful about his hike—in the breezy, affable style of the Anglo adventurer—but he must've suffered terribly, judging from the numerous bandages on his feet, which he showed us.
Jac's own stories were all about drinking, and though I might have been projecting, it seemed to me that Tony listened with a rather forced smile. In one story, set in Brisbane, Jac was out drinking at a club, met some people, went back to their apartment to continue the festivities, then came out onto the street at dawn; still half-drunk, he discovered he had no idea where he was. Much emphasis was put on this confusion, the point of the story really, the ridiculous fact that he could get lost in his own home city, that's how drunk he had been. He had ended up calling his mother for help, while he stumbled down the early morning street. She had been initially flustered, not understanding how he could be so lost; but eventually she told him to go to the nearest corner and name the cross-streets, which she looked up online and then directed him home.
In the midst of the talk, Rachael made hot chocolate, then poured in each mug a dollop of brandy (a food box treat). Jac declined a mug, holding up his flask to show that he was all set. Ian put more wood on the fire, and Tony turned the conversation away from Jac's drinking exploits by asking Beatta and Ian about their plans. I wanted, though, to hear more about Tony, who I felt particularly drawn to. But soon after he and Mike and Jac excused themselves and went off to their tents.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
My accent and red bandana makes a man think of cowboys
After seventeen kilometers, I ended the walking day on a ridgetop, sitting alone on a rocky outcropping overlooking Ormiston Pound, a vast plain of witchetty bush; a dry watercourse wove across the huge flat, marked out by river red gums rather than water. The sun was starting to drop towards the west, but the late afternoon was still hot, with just a bare hint of breeze. Flies cavorted close around my face, and their faint buzzing was the only sound, apart from a lone cricket hidden in the rocks close by. Across the Pound rose the tailend of the Chewings Range, most prominently Mt. Giles. To the north stood Mt. Sonder, looking considerably closer than on recent days. Close behind me grew a copse of bushes, among which I'd found a fire ring and several small tent spots cleared of stones. A number of people hiking eastwards on the trail had praised this high and dry campsite, and we had decided to heed their advice and stay the night, carrying extra water to get us through to the next source, another day's walk west.
The day on the trail had been one of the more beautiful and satisfying of the walk. Early on we came up a lovely gorge, Inarlanga Pass, where big boulders were crowded by spearwood and teatree and cycads. Though the cycads are a common feature of the MacDonnell Range gorges, they always struck me as strange oddities--and they are: relict species from much wetter times, somehow able to survive into the long deserty era, shaded by the high cliffs of the gaps, waiting for the occasional flood to pass briefly through.
The pass, I read, had been an important watering point and ceremonial place for the local Aboriginal people, the Arrernte; only men were allowed, though, since the pass also functioned as the route to Giles Springs, a men's ceremonial site (from what I can tell, most such sites are segregated by sex--a place is either for women or for men, rarely both).
The pass opened up into hills, and soon after the trail came out into a broad and striking brown valley with open, sloping sides that formed a pleasingly symmetrical trough. High on both sides the walls ended at crenellated bluffs, ragged against the blue, cloudless sky. All through this valley, brown shale-like outcroppings of rock stood up, like a vast collection of nameless tombstones, marching up the slopes, glowing, lit by the bright and yellow early morning sun.
The path rose gently to a saddle, and just short of the top I came upon a group of seven older people, all in their sixties I'd guess, resting in the shade of a large brown boulder, their big packs littered about. I paused to say hello, and learned that they were members of the Brisbane Bush Walkers Club; they too praised the ridgetop campsite, and I said, yes, that's the plan.
Soon after, I came upon the last member of the group, a stout elderly man, hatless and sweating. We met at a narrow spot, and I stood just off the trail to let him pass, but he stopped. He asked if I was enjoying the hike, and I said I was, and his expression told me I had answered correctly. He gestured at the valley told me that it reminded him of American westerns he had seen at the movie theater when he was a child. "This was before television, you know," he said, "I'm that old." I smiled, acknowledging his long ago experience more than his advanced age, and said yes, I could see the resemblance too. Then he welcomed me to Australia, "because I can tell you're from overseas," he said. I was charmed by this hospitable gesture, his willingness to assume the host's responsibility for a whole country. He asked, as others have, if I had come specifically to hike the Larapinta Trail, and when I said I had, he seemed pleased, as if he was responsible for the trail and the MacDonnells as well.
Later, Rachael stopped and spoke to this same man, and he also mentioned to her the western movies of his childhood. She told him it was as much me as the valley, my accent and the red bandana I had tied around my neck (to protect it from the sun). The man had said she was probably right.
The path descended into another valley, similar to the first, then rose to another saddle. Just on the other side I came upon a second and larger, but also elderly group of hikers. These were dayhikers, members of the Adelaide chapter of the Australian equivalent of the AARP. Like the group the day before, they were doing the entire Larapinta, but not camping on the trail; on this day they were hiking over thirty kilometers, covering what Rachael and I had broken into two days of walking. I stepped off the narrow trail to let them pass, saying hello to each. They were a tired and sweaty and determined and mostly happy looking bunch, a little more than halfway through their long day. One of the last and oldest, a pale, thin man with white spittle in the corners of his mouth, stopped and asked where I was from and what I was doing in Australia. He said "good for you" when I described my trip. His well-worn daypack was completely covered with sewn-on patches commemorating the various places he had hiked, and I wanted to ask him questions too, but the people behind were piling up, and he set off again slowly up the hill.
The last person in the group was the guide, a man in his forties with a nametag that read "Trevor Lee." He told me about the group's itinerary, and that they were from Adelaide. He said that the whole group was larger, and that they had been divided into an "A group" and a "B group"; those I had met were the As. The B people were doing shorter, less strenuous hikes--but still ten to twenty kilometers a day. (Later, after we were off the trail at Glen Helen--a motel and campground and bar--Chris talked to one of the group; this man had started as an A but dropped down to the Bs, saying the A group was "too competitive." The only two casualties of the trip, though, both came from the B group, including a woman who had fallen and gashed her forehead, and had to be rushed to the hospital in Alice Springs.)
One of the women in the group on the trail had said, "You've got quite a hill ahead of you." I generally don't like such heads-up comments, as I'd rather discover what lies ahead for myself; but she was right. The climb up from Waterfall Gorge (more gully than gorge) was long and nearly straight up to the ridge top, two slow and taxing kilometers in the heat of the afternoon. But I felt strong, felt like I was gaining strength with each day we spent walking. When I finally reached the top, I didn't stop, but set off westwards along the ridge, another couple kilometers to the campsite, where for a time I sat alone on the rocky outcropping gazing out over Ormiston Pound.
Later, after I'd put up the tent and Rachael had gathered firewood, we sat together on the outcropping to watch the sun set. Rachael made tea on the small stove and I read aloud a story from a small volume of Tolstoy called Twenty-three Tales. We had made a habit of these readings in the evenings, usually while Rachael cooked. Most of the stories, written in the 1880s and 1890s, were Christian parables about Russian peasants who learned or modeled loving patience and generosity. On this night I read, "A Spark Neglected Burns the House."
Before dark Chris and Krystal appeared, and later we shared a fire again. We talked of Australian films, and I named the few I had seen, and they named others I should see. Rachael said Rabbit-Proof Fence and Ten Canoes; Chris said Kangaroo Jack and Wog Boy.
Chris also talked about his desire to join NORFORCE (North-West Mobile Force), an official but from what I could tell quasi military regiment that patrols northern Australia, especially near the coast, engaging in surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The force was established in the 1980s, but harkens back to World War II, when a similar group was organized in the face of a feared Japanese invasion. I'm not quite sure what the threat is today, drug smuggling I think, potentially the Chinese too, maybe the Asian horde in general (though that last is not really fair; Australia seems pretty open to Asian immigrants). Over half of the regiment is made up of Aboriginal men, and they are valued for their bush skills (sort of like American Indian scouts in the 19th century?). From what Chris said, I'd guess he's drawn partly out of patriotism, partly by a strong anti-drug position, but mostly by the opportunity to go on backcountry scouting expeditions. It's the sort of challenge that appeals to him, not unrelated to camel racing or hiking the Larapinta.
The day on the trail had been one of the more beautiful and satisfying of the walk. Early on we came up a lovely gorge, Inarlanga Pass, where big boulders were crowded by spearwood and teatree and cycads. Though the cycads are a common feature of the MacDonnell Range gorges, they always struck me as strange oddities--and they are: relict species from much wetter times, somehow able to survive into the long deserty era, shaded by the high cliffs of the gaps, waiting for the occasional flood to pass briefly through.
The pass, I read, had been an important watering point and ceremonial place for the local Aboriginal people, the Arrernte; only men were allowed, though, since the pass also functioned as the route to Giles Springs, a men's ceremonial site (from what I can tell, most such sites are segregated by sex--a place is either for women or for men, rarely both).
The pass opened up into hills, and soon after the trail came out into a broad and striking brown valley with open, sloping sides that formed a pleasingly symmetrical trough. High on both sides the walls ended at crenellated bluffs, ragged against the blue, cloudless sky. All through this valley, brown shale-like outcroppings of rock stood up, like a vast collection of nameless tombstones, marching up the slopes, glowing, lit by the bright and yellow early morning sun.
The path rose gently to a saddle, and just short of the top I came upon a group of seven older people, all in their sixties I'd guess, resting in the shade of a large brown boulder, their big packs littered about. I paused to say hello, and learned that they were members of the Brisbane Bush Walkers Club; they too praised the ridgetop campsite, and I said, yes, that's the plan.
Soon after, I came upon the last member of the group, a stout elderly man, hatless and sweating. We met at a narrow spot, and I stood just off the trail to let him pass, but he stopped. He asked if I was enjoying the hike, and I said I was, and his expression told me I had answered correctly. He gestured at the valley told me that it reminded him of American westerns he had seen at the movie theater when he was a child. "This was before television, you know," he said, "I'm that old." I smiled, acknowledging his long ago experience more than his advanced age, and said yes, I could see the resemblance too. Then he welcomed me to Australia, "because I can tell you're from overseas," he said. I was charmed by this hospitable gesture, his willingness to assume the host's responsibility for a whole country. He asked, as others have, if I had come specifically to hike the Larapinta Trail, and when I said I had, he seemed pleased, as if he was responsible for the trail and the MacDonnells as well.
Later, Rachael stopped and spoke to this same man, and he also mentioned to her the western movies of his childhood. She told him it was as much me as the valley, my accent and the red bandana I had tied around my neck (to protect it from the sun). The man had said she was probably right.
The path descended into another valley, similar to the first, then rose to another saddle. Just on the other side I came upon a second and larger, but also elderly group of hikers. These were dayhikers, members of the Adelaide chapter of the Australian equivalent of the AARP. Like the group the day before, they were doing the entire Larapinta, but not camping on the trail; on this day they were hiking over thirty kilometers, covering what Rachael and I had broken into two days of walking. I stepped off the narrow trail to let them pass, saying hello to each. They were a tired and sweaty and determined and mostly happy looking bunch, a little more than halfway through their long day. One of the last and oldest, a pale, thin man with white spittle in the corners of his mouth, stopped and asked where I was from and what I was doing in Australia. He said "good for you" when I described my trip. His well-worn daypack was completely covered with sewn-on patches commemorating the various places he had hiked, and I wanted to ask him questions too, but the people behind were piling up, and he set off again slowly up the hill.
The last person in the group was the guide, a man in his forties with a nametag that read "Trevor Lee." He told me about the group's itinerary, and that they were from Adelaide. He said that the whole group was larger, and that they had been divided into an "A group" and a "B group"; those I had met were the As. The B people were doing shorter, less strenuous hikes--but still ten to twenty kilometers a day. (Later, after we were off the trail at Glen Helen--a motel and campground and bar--Chris talked to one of the group; this man had started as an A but dropped down to the Bs, saying the A group was "too competitive." The only two casualties of the trip, though, both came from the B group, including a woman who had fallen and gashed her forehead, and had to be rushed to the hospital in Alice Springs.)
One of the women in the group on the trail had said, "You've got quite a hill ahead of you." I generally don't like such heads-up comments, as I'd rather discover what lies ahead for myself; but she was right. The climb up from Waterfall Gorge (more gully than gorge) was long and nearly straight up to the ridge top, two slow and taxing kilometers in the heat of the afternoon. But I felt strong, felt like I was gaining strength with each day we spent walking. When I finally reached the top, I didn't stop, but set off westwards along the ridge, another couple kilometers to the campsite, where for a time I sat alone on the rocky outcropping gazing out over Ormiston Pound.
Later, after I'd put up the tent and Rachael had gathered firewood, we sat together on the outcropping to watch the sun set. Rachael made tea on the small stove and I read aloud a story from a small volume of Tolstoy called Twenty-three Tales. We had made a habit of these readings in the evenings, usually while Rachael cooked. Most of the stories, written in the 1880s and 1890s, were Christian parables about Russian peasants who learned or modeled loving patience and generosity. On this night I read, "A Spark Neglected Burns the House."
Before dark Chris and Krystal appeared, and later we shared a fire again. We talked of Australian films, and I named the few I had seen, and they named others I should see. Rachael said Rabbit-Proof Fence and Ten Canoes; Chris said Kangaroo Jack and Wog Boy.
Chris also talked about his desire to join NORFORCE (North-West Mobile Force), an official but from what I could tell quasi military regiment that patrols northern Australia, especially near the coast, engaging in surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The force was established in the 1980s, but harkens back to World War II, when a similar group was organized in the face of a feared Japanese invasion. I'm not quite sure what the threat is today, drug smuggling I think, potentially the Chinese too, maybe the Asian horde in general (though that last is not really fair; Australia seems pretty open to Asian immigrants). Over half of the regiment is made up of Aboriginal men, and they are valued for their bush skills (sort of like American Indian scouts in the 19th century?). From what Chris said, I'd guess he's drawn partly out of patriotism, partly by a strong anti-drug position, but mostly by the opportunity to go on backcountry scouting expeditions. It's the sort of challenge that appeals to him, not unrelated to camel racing or hiking the Larapinta.
Friday, July 25, 2008
You can see a long way from Count's Point
The first several kilometers of the morning trail led steadily up to a high ridge. Not far from camp, I came upon Chris and Krystal, who had come up out the cold and shady gorge to have their "brekky" at a rocky outcropping in the sun. Soon after, I passed a group of dayhikers, led by a guide with dreads who carried a heavy pack containing their lunch. This group of ten or so, mostly women varying in age from late twenties to late sixties, was also walking the whole Larapinta, but they were being dropped off and picked up at the start and end of sections, and at night sleeping in hotels (at either a nearby resort or in Alice), a few times in campgrounds.
Rachael and I took a rest at the top of the ridge, and the dayhikers soon passed us. The top was a spare and jumbled field of rocks, and it had taken some looking to find stones flat and large enough to accommodate sitting. The Heavitree Range, like the Chewings, is topped with exposed quartzite, loose rocks and tilted, on-end slabs; but the rock was paler (though the dirt between and below was still red) and the vegetation more sparse--just a scattering of low spiky green grasses and the occasional mallee bush with most of its splayed branches burned and dead.
We continued along the ridge westwards, and I slowed my pace, stopped often to take in the far views (the path was too rocky for walking and gazing about at the same time). I felt giddy with the pleasure of the high trail, the bright sunshine, the sharp and handsome rocks beneath my feet, the dozens of miles of mountains before and behind me, the valleys far below on either side. A cool desert morning on a ridgetop inclines me towards an ecstatic love of the world....
We walked right to the end of the ridge, to Count's Point, where the dayhikers were having lunch, and where we did too. We made it a long lunch sitting on the rocks, and eating peanut butter sandwiches and individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and admiring the view. To the west, the ridges of the MacDonnell Range marched off in an impressively symmetrical manner, punctuated by three of the four highest peaks in the Northern Territory: Mt. Giles, Mt. Sonder, and Mt. Zeil, staggered in the distance. To the southwest we could see Gosse Bluff, a wide crater made 130 million years ago by a massive comet, whose shockwaves had shattered the rock strata for thousands of meters underground and altered the geology of the whole region. To the south rolling redlands stretched for hundreds of miles, down towards Uluru and Kings Canyon.
Chris and Krystal had come up with us, and just before we all descended the ridge Chris borrowed Rachael’s cellphone to call his mother in Sydney. When she answered we could all hear her screams of happy surprise, and Chris momentarily held the phone away from his ear.
When he got off, he said to Krystal, “good news, we have another month of bookings for the house.”
Krystal clapped her hands, then took a quick breath, indicating she had just made a discovery. “That means we can have another month before we go back to work.” Chris agreed, and they immediately began discussing the near future possibilities.
Chris had bought the house, which is somewhere on the coast south of Sydney, I can’t remember where, the year before, with his mother’s encouragement and financial help. He’d spent most of the past year, up until a couple months ago, restoring the house. Now he rented it out to vacationers, with his mother acting as agent. The more bookings, the less he and Krystal had to make to pay the mortgage. At some point in the vague future they thought they might settle down and live in the house themselves. At least his mother, who lived nearby, hoped so.
A steep descent, then a walk through hilly mulga forest brought us after another couple hours to the night's campsite, in among a stand of small trees just downhill from Serpentine Chalet Dam. The small dam was a strange and unusual artifact in that place, a gray wall of concrete plugging a modest gorge. It is long defunct, with only sand behind and almost right up to the lip. The dam had been put up in 1960 by two Italian carpenters (whose names are stenciled in the outer wall), to provide water for Serpentine Chalet two kilometers downhill and now abandoned and in ruins as well.
Chris and Krystal had arrived first, and Chris had collected wood and set it beside a small fire ring near their tent. When we arrived he pointed out his fire, implying it would do for us all. For the last couple nights they had shared Rachael's fire, and apparently he wanted to return the favor, or have control of the fire, or both. But Rachael wanted her own fire. "Do you think that would be rude?" she asked me. Not exactly rude, but it made me a little uncomfortable, and I suggested maybe we should defer to Chris this time. Rachael considered then went ahead and made a fire in the ring at our campsite, maybe twenty yards from Chris and Krystal's. We ended up cooking and eating dinner at our separate fires (both of them, by the way, technically illegal), but then Chris and Krystal gathered at Rachael's fire for the social part of the evening. It was the better fire of the two.
While we were setting up camp, a lone man arrived from the west, and he put up his rather large tent between our site and Chris and Krystal's. He cooked his dinner on a stove, sitting in the door of his tent.
After dark, Rachael invited him to our fireside. His name was Marcus, and he was from Germany. He had come limping into camp, and he moved slowly as he squatted down by the fire. A few days before he had started on the trail with a recently met companion, an American, and soon both were experiencing knee trouble. The other man had left the trail already, but Marcus was hoping to continue at least as far as Ellery Creek, two more days to the east. If his knees weren't any better then, he said, he'd hitchhike back to Alice.
But he was reluctant to give up, in part because of the money he'd already spent on food and transportation. Most people hiking the trail have paid three hundred dollars to be shuttled out to the western end, making their food drops along the way.
Marcus was in his early thirties, bearded and long-haired, diffident and soft-spoken as he answered questions from Rachael and Krystal. His English was good, but sometimes he didn't understand what was said to him, and he was often tentative in trying out words and phrases, though he usually had them right. For a long time when he first came to the fire he held a self-rolled cigarette in one hand, unlit; when he finally smoked it, he turned aside discreetly at each exhalation. He told us he had come to Australia seven weeks before and planned to stay a year; he had a work visa and would travel till his money ran low, then get a job. He'd mostly been in the north, in Darwin at first. "I sit on the beach," he said, "for two weeks, yes." He nodded but didn't smile. "It is good," he added.
He said that after the Larapinta he hoped to find someone who could give him a ride to Cairns, on the northeast coast. He had driven down to Alice with people he met farther north. I envied him greatly, his time mostly, the open days ahead of him, but his calm demeanor as well, and the sense I had that he was up for whatever came his way. I wondered what sort of life he had led in Germany, and why so many Germans are out about in the world, but we didn't get to those questions. Conversations with other travelers are usually partial, incomplete; often I'm left wanting to know more. But when the fire wood was all burned, we said good night and went off to our different tents.
Rachael and I took a rest at the top of the ridge, and the dayhikers soon passed us. The top was a spare and jumbled field of rocks, and it had taken some looking to find stones flat and large enough to accommodate sitting. The Heavitree Range, like the Chewings, is topped with exposed quartzite, loose rocks and tilted, on-end slabs; but the rock was paler (though the dirt between and below was still red) and the vegetation more sparse--just a scattering of low spiky green grasses and the occasional mallee bush with most of its splayed branches burned and dead.
We continued along the ridge westwards, and I slowed my pace, stopped often to take in the far views (the path was too rocky for walking and gazing about at the same time). I felt giddy with the pleasure of the high trail, the bright sunshine, the sharp and handsome rocks beneath my feet, the dozens of miles of mountains before and behind me, the valleys far below on either side. A cool desert morning on a ridgetop inclines me towards an ecstatic love of the world....
We walked right to the end of the ridge, to Count's Point, where the dayhikers were having lunch, and where we did too. We made it a long lunch sitting on the rocks, and eating peanut butter sandwiches and individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and admiring the view. To the west, the ridges of the MacDonnell Range marched off in an impressively symmetrical manner, punctuated by three of the four highest peaks in the Northern Territory: Mt. Giles, Mt. Sonder, and Mt. Zeil, staggered in the distance. To the southwest we could see Gosse Bluff, a wide crater made 130 million years ago by a massive comet, whose shockwaves had shattered the rock strata for thousands of meters underground and altered the geology of the whole region. To the south rolling redlands stretched for hundreds of miles, down towards Uluru and Kings Canyon.
Chris and Krystal had come up with us, and just before we all descended the ridge Chris borrowed Rachael’s cellphone to call his mother in Sydney. When she answered we could all hear her screams of happy surprise, and Chris momentarily held the phone away from his ear.
When he got off, he said to Krystal, “good news, we have another month of bookings for the house.”
Krystal clapped her hands, then took a quick breath, indicating she had just made a discovery. “That means we can have another month before we go back to work.” Chris agreed, and they immediately began discussing the near future possibilities.
Chris had bought the house, which is somewhere on the coast south of Sydney, I can’t remember where, the year before, with his mother’s encouragement and financial help. He’d spent most of the past year, up until a couple months ago, restoring the house. Now he rented it out to vacationers, with his mother acting as agent. The more bookings, the less he and Krystal had to make to pay the mortgage. At some point in the vague future they thought they might settle down and live in the house themselves. At least his mother, who lived nearby, hoped so.
A steep descent, then a walk through hilly mulga forest brought us after another couple hours to the night's campsite, in among a stand of small trees just downhill from Serpentine Chalet Dam. The small dam was a strange and unusual artifact in that place, a gray wall of concrete plugging a modest gorge. It is long defunct, with only sand behind and almost right up to the lip. The dam had been put up in 1960 by two Italian carpenters (whose names are stenciled in the outer wall), to provide water for Serpentine Chalet two kilometers downhill and now abandoned and in ruins as well.
Chris and Krystal had arrived first, and Chris had collected wood and set it beside a small fire ring near their tent. When we arrived he pointed out his fire, implying it would do for us all. For the last couple nights they had shared Rachael's fire, and apparently he wanted to return the favor, or have control of the fire, or both. But Rachael wanted her own fire. "Do you think that would be rude?" she asked me. Not exactly rude, but it made me a little uncomfortable, and I suggested maybe we should defer to Chris this time. Rachael considered then went ahead and made a fire in the ring at our campsite, maybe twenty yards from Chris and Krystal's. We ended up cooking and eating dinner at our separate fires (both of them, by the way, technically illegal), but then Chris and Krystal gathered at Rachael's fire for the social part of the evening. It was the better fire of the two.
While we were setting up camp, a lone man arrived from the west, and he put up his rather large tent between our site and Chris and Krystal's. He cooked his dinner on a stove, sitting in the door of his tent.
After dark, Rachael invited him to our fireside. His name was Marcus, and he was from Germany. He had come limping into camp, and he moved slowly as he squatted down by the fire. A few days before he had started on the trail with a recently met companion, an American, and soon both were experiencing knee trouble. The other man had left the trail already, but Marcus was hoping to continue at least as far as Ellery Creek, two more days to the east. If his knees weren't any better then, he said, he'd hitchhike back to Alice.
But he was reluctant to give up, in part because of the money he'd already spent on food and transportation. Most people hiking the trail have paid three hundred dollars to be shuttled out to the western end, making their food drops along the way.
Marcus was in his early thirties, bearded and long-haired, diffident and soft-spoken as he answered questions from Rachael and Krystal. His English was good, but sometimes he didn't understand what was said to him, and he was often tentative in trying out words and phrases, though he usually had them right. For a long time when he first came to the fire he held a self-rolled cigarette in one hand, unlit; when he finally smoked it, he turned aside discreetly at each exhalation. He told us he had come to Australia seven weeks before and planned to stay a year; he had a work visa and would travel till his money ran low, then get a job. He'd mostly been in the north, in Darwin at first. "I sit on the beach," he said, "for two weeks, yes." He nodded but didn't smile. "It is good," he added.
He said that after the Larapinta he hoped to find someone who could give him a ride to Cairns, on the northeast coast. He had driven down to Alice with people he met farther north. I envied him greatly, his time mostly, the open days ahead of him, but his calm demeanor as well, and the sense I had that he was up for whatever came his way. I wondered what sort of life he had led in Germany, and why so many Germans are out about in the world, but we didn't get to those questions. Conversations with other travelers are usually partial, incomplete; often I'm left wanting to know more. But when the fire wood was all burned, we said good night and went off to our different tents.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
With Chris and Krystal at Serpentine Gorge
Late in the morning I left my walking stick behind again, but this time I only had to go back one kilometer.
We had another relatively short day, walking fourteen kilometers through small hills on the south side of and below the main ridge of the Heavitree Range. The open ground was dark grey-brown, a dolomite formation littered with stones and spinifex grass and small mallee trees. Occasionally the trail climbed to darker and sharper outcroppings of the crumbly dolomite, and offered views far to the south. In the first hour or so, according to the map, we passed though likely habitat for the common brushtail possum, but I saw none of the shy creatures. Apparently predation by cats and foxes, and grazing pressures from cattle, rabbits, and horses in Central Australia have made them quite rare.
We camped downstream from Serpentine Gorge, a smaller, less spectacular gap than most, but attractive to birds. Yellow-throated miners swooped between gum trees up in the gorge, and a willie wagtail hopped along the shore of the small pool. At dusk Rachael spotted a rock wallaby on the far side of a small pool, but I missed it. Down at the brushy and unprepossessing campsite, numerous birds occupied the shrubbery, but few showed themselves long enough for me to make an identification.
The campsite had only water tanks, two small ones, but I found scattered among the bushes several small concrete aprons and a number of metal poles with electric sockets attached, the plastic of the outlets half melted by years of summer heat. It seemed that sometime years past there had been a car and RV campground at the spot.
Chris and Krystal appeared just at dark and put up their tent nearby. We shared a campfire and talked late again. Those two did most of the talking, but I was content to listen, and Rachael encouraged them with questions. Krystal is a tall, thin young woman, with a sharp nose and long thin attractive face, an active mouth, and a distinctive throaty laugh which she resorts to often. She's well spoken and not shy about speaking. Chris is not small, not large, of medium-build but obviously strong; his face is sunburnt though he often wears the Australian version of a cowboy hat, made of thick felt. He's competent, a man with a wide set of technical skills and great curiosity; he's generous and helpful and a bit of a know-it-all. Like Krystal, he's not shy about talking, but he's a little rougher than her, more working class as compared to her apparently bourgeois upbringing. We heard the story of how they met, a not unusual tale: it was at a bar in Alice, he was immediately interested, she was not, he persisted over subsequent days, she changed her mind. There was something too about how he was supposed to have left town, but had stayed for some reason and met her the next day, and then he did go off to Darwin to start a new job, but he quit after four weeks and came back, and soon they were madly in love. My sense is that Chris is someone who usually figures out how to get what he wants.
As a conversational team they were mostly good about letting each other talk, which is not always the case with couples, especially when the two people are both big talkers. But occasionally they couldn't resist correcting each other, usually over small details. Most often Krystal was the one who interrupted. Chris, in the midst of a story, would say, "it was three in the morning," and Krystal would stop him and say, "no it was one." Chris would turn to her (he never ignored her) and insist on his original figure: "it was three." However, Krystal would not back down, saying, "No, Chris, it was one, I remember." Chris would then try (a slight) compromise, saying, "Well, maybe 2:30." But Krystal would have none of it; "I don't think so," she would say, but then, aware that the momentum of the story had been arrested, she would add, "but anyway," willing to let the story go on, despite the inaccuracy.
Occasionally, Krystal would also take exception at a more macro level. Chris would be halfway through a story, or maybe near the end, and Krystal would laugh and say, "well, there was more to it than that." Chris never showed any rancor, never seemed annoyed--they almost always got on quite well--but would only pause briefly, acknowledging her comment, before continuing his anecdote. Krystal, having made her point, was content to let him go ahead and tell his overly simplified version of the episode.
The stars were thick in the night sky again, with the sort of abundance it's hard to look away from. We stayed by the fire late, often standing to warm our freezing backsides (the next morning the water bottles were full of ice). Chris and Krystal talked about their plans to move north to Darwin, but not yet, Alice still held them. I admired the lives they were leading, working only to put together enough money to set off again, always casting about for the next adventure, ready to fall into conversation with almost everyone they met--open to what life in Central Australia could offer them, seeking how to best make for themselves full and interesting days. Krystal talked about how eventually they hoped to settle down and have children, but I imagined that wouldn't slow them down all that much.
(After I got home from Australia, Rachael forwarded me an email from Krystal, describing some of what they'd been doing after the Larapinta: "And we also went to the Harts Range Races and Rodeo, a bush event about two and half hours north east of here [Alice]. How's this for a weekend - Chris won Best 4WD for the Ute ($150 and a $300 tyre voucher) [ute=pick-up], the Station Buckjump which is riding a bucking horse and cracking a whip at the same time ($200 and a buckle), Calf Scruffing ($100) and Calf Undressing ($100).")
We had another relatively short day, walking fourteen kilometers through small hills on the south side of and below the main ridge of the Heavitree Range. The open ground was dark grey-brown, a dolomite formation littered with stones and spinifex grass and small mallee trees. Occasionally the trail climbed to darker and sharper outcroppings of the crumbly dolomite, and offered views far to the south. In the first hour or so, according to the map, we passed though likely habitat for the common brushtail possum, but I saw none of the shy creatures. Apparently predation by cats and foxes, and grazing pressures from cattle, rabbits, and horses in Central Australia have made them quite rare.
We camped downstream from Serpentine Gorge, a smaller, less spectacular gap than most, but attractive to birds. Yellow-throated miners swooped between gum trees up in the gorge, and a willie wagtail hopped along the shore of the small pool. At dusk Rachael spotted a rock wallaby on the far side of a small pool, but I missed it. Down at the brushy and unprepossessing campsite, numerous birds occupied the shrubbery, but few showed themselves long enough for me to make an identification.
The campsite had only water tanks, two small ones, but I found scattered among the bushes several small concrete aprons and a number of metal poles with electric sockets attached, the plastic of the outlets half melted by years of summer heat. It seemed that sometime years past there had been a car and RV campground at the spot.
Chris and Krystal appeared just at dark and put up their tent nearby. We shared a campfire and talked late again. Those two did most of the talking, but I was content to listen, and Rachael encouraged them with questions. Krystal is a tall, thin young woman, with a sharp nose and long thin attractive face, an active mouth, and a distinctive throaty laugh which she resorts to often. She's well spoken and not shy about speaking. Chris is not small, not large, of medium-build but obviously strong; his face is sunburnt though he often wears the Australian version of a cowboy hat, made of thick felt. He's competent, a man with a wide set of technical skills and great curiosity; he's generous and helpful and a bit of a know-it-all. Like Krystal, he's not shy about talking, but he's a little rougher than her, more working class as compared to her apparently bourgeois upbringing. We heard the story of how they met, a not unusual tale: it was at a bar in Alice, he was immediately interested, she was not, he persisted over subsequent days, she changed her mind. There was something too about how he was supposed to have left town, but had stayed for some reason and met her the next day, and then he did go off to Darwin to start a new job, but he quit after four weeks and came back, and soon they were madly in love. My sense is that Chris is someone who usually figures out how to get what he wants.
As a conversational team they were mostly good about letting each other talk, which is not always the case with couples, especially when the two people are both big talkers. But occasionally they couldn't resist correcting each other, usually over small details. Most often Krystal was the one who interrupted. Chris, in the midst of a story, would say, "it was three in the morning," and Krystal would stop him and say, "no it was one." Chris would turn to her (he never ignored her) and insist on his original figure: "it was three." However, Krystal would not back down, saying, "No, Chris, it was one, I remember." Chris would then try (a slight) compromise, saying, "Well, maybe 2:30." But Krystal would have none of it; "I don't think so," she would say, but then, aware that the momentum of the story had been arrested, she would add, "but anyway," willing to let the story go on, despite the inaccuracy.
Occasionally, Krystal would also take exception at a more macro level. Chris would be halfway through a story, or maybe near the end, and Krystal would laugh and say, "well, there was more to it than that." Chris never showed any rancor, never seemed annoyed--they almost always got on quite well--but would only pause briefly, acknowledging her comment, before continuing his anecdote. Krystal, having made her point, was content to let him go ahead and tell his overly simplified version of the episode.
The stars were thick in the night sky again, with the sort of abundance it's hard to look away from. We stayed by the fire late, often standing to warm our freezing backsides (the next morning the water bottles were full of ice). Chris and Krystal talked about their plans to move north to Darwin, but not yet, Alice still held them. I admired the lives they were leading, working only to put together enough money to set off again, always casting about for the next adventure, ready to fall into conversation with almost everyone they met--open to what life in Central Australia could offer them, seeking how to best make for themselves full and interesting days. Krystal talked about how eventually they hoped to settle down and have children, but I imagined that wouldn't slow them down all that much.
(After I got home from Australia, Rachael forwarded me an email from Krystal, describing some of what they'd been doing after the Larapinta: "And we also went to the Harts Range Races and Rodeo, a bush event about two and half hours north east of here [Alice]. How's this for a weekend - Chris won Best 4WD for the Ute ($150 and a $300 tyre voucher) [ute=pick-up], the Station Buckjump which is riding a bucking horse and cracking a whip at the same time ($200 and a buckle), Calf Scruffing ($100) and Calf Undressing ($100).")
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Australians like the way Richard talks
The muesli was gone, as was almost all our food, which meant light packs; our water was low too, but we had enough to get to the next stop. Rachael resuscitated the fire, and we lingered in camp as the sun gained height, sipping hot chocolate and each eating a granola bar for breakfast. We would need only a few hours of walking to get to the next campsite.
Three kilometers brought us to the foot of the Heavitree Range, and we climbed to a saddle, dropped down onto the southern side, then turned west, walking through low open hills dotted with small blue mallee trees. By lunchtime we had reached Ellery Creek.
A dirt road comes into Ellery Creek, admitting visitors drawn by a large, permanent pool, Big Hole, that stops up a gap in the range. A small campground offers low wooden platforms, fire pits, and gas grills, as well as a bathroom with toilets but no sinks. The spigots of two large adjacent water tanks do little more than drip water, I suppose to discourage waste. Nonetheless, later in the afternoon Rachael and I managed to wash a few clothes; she filled a plastic shopping bag and did a proper job, while I settled on simply soaking and wringing out two shirts and two pairs of socks and a pair of underwear.
First, though, we retrieved our food box from a small locked closet in the bathroom building; Rachael had dropped off the box the week before. She used one of the grills to heat up mushroom soup for our lunch, and we spread peanut butter on thin, dense slabs of brown rye bread. A bevy of flies played around the rim of my bowl, landed on the bread and on my face--but I wasn't bothered, not too much. We had covered about 130 desert mountain kilometers in a week, settled in to carrying our belongings, to sleeping and eating out, and on this day we had reached a new food supply and a place with a few amenities, including the opportunity to clean up a bit. I was feeling good.
After lunch and laundry we repaired to Big Hole. A pair of ducks paddled about on one side, but soon disappeared into a tall stand of reeds. On the other side, big gum trees grew close to the edge, giving way where a cliff fell into the water. On the far side the pool narrowed into the gap. A sandy beach sloped down to our side of the pool, and Rachael was soon in the water, though not for more than five minutes. The pool was frigid, and while swimmers are common in summer they are apparently the exception in winter. Several groups of people came down while we sat beside the pool--a couple contingents of French, two men from Sydney on a tour of the Northern territory--but all were fully dressed in the sixtyish afternoon. They only laughed and shook their heads when asked if they planned to go in. I too had decided against the cold water, content instead to sit on the side in the sun and read a little Trollope. But I soon realized I would regret such timidity, and quickly, before I could change my mind, disrobed and ran and dove into the water. Just as quickly, and maybe more so, I turned around and clambered out of the shockingly cold water. Rachael chided me, "that hardly counts, you should have a swim." Oh, but it counted, and I'd had as much swim as I wanted. Drying in the sun felt wonderful.
At camp, Rachael chatted up a man from Alice, who was leading a small tour group at the end of its tour. He offered her some of the leftover food, including a loaf of white bread, a bag of tomatoes, a package of individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and a large pile of sliced ham wrapped in foil. Soon I was stuffing a large sandwich in my mouth, a treat that later effectively ruined my dinner (but it was corn soup, which I didn't like anyway). We had met another hiker, a man who had come in from the west soon after we arrived, and Rachael offered him some of our food bounty. He too had a big sandwich.
Later, this man, Richard, would share our fire. He was the only other American I met on the trail (not including the ex-pat Jo); most people were Australian, with a few British and western Europeans sprinkled in. As we went along, we would meet others who had met Richard, and everyone remembered him for his accent, which the Australians in particular found fascinating. Richard was from Tennessee and he spoke with a slow and distinctive southern drawl. I heard more than one person liken him to Forrest Gump, but Richard was a bit sharper.
Back in the States, he was a math professor at Tennessee Tech. He'd been teaching for twenty-six years and in three years would be eligible for retirement, which he planned to take. He said he wanted to see what it was like to travel in fall and winter and not just summer. In speaking of himself, he was reserved and circumspect, and we learned little more of his life in Tennessee. He did reveal that he had been to Australia four times, the first time to see a woman in Adelaide. Rachael asked about this woman, but only learned that Richard had met her at a conference in the States, and that on subsequent visits to Australia he had seen her but hadn't spent so much time in Adelaide as on the first visit. Twice he had taken seven weeks to hike the 1200-kilometer Heysen trail. "I just really liked it," he said, "so I did it again." That sounded a bit Gumpish to me, but I didn't say so out loud.
Just at dark, Krystal and Chris from Standley Chasm appeared. They had camped atop Brinkley Bluff three nights before, when we had been at Birthday Waterhole, and had been slowly gaining on us since. They shared our fire, as did Richard, and we all sat together long into the dark night. Chris gave an account of running the bulls in Pamplona, which he'd done a couple years past, but he downplayed the danger; he had worked at cattle stations in the Outback, and he said it was scarier getting in a truck and loading steers than it had been dashing from bulls in Spain. Krystal told us how Chris had recently won second place at the Camel Cup, an annual race in Alice Springs—though it had been his first time astride a camel. He had wanted her to do the "Honeymoon Race" with him, a relay in which the man rides the first half of the race, the woman the second. But she declined, saying she was not going to stand in the middle of the track with a herd of camels bearing down on her.
She and Chris had both been to the U.S., separately, Chris working on an itinerant agriculture crew of some sort in the Southwest, Krystal for International Student Volunteers, recruiting students at college campuses. University of Texas at Austin had been her favorite. They had left Sydney a couple months earlier, planning to move to Darwin, up on the north coast. But Alice had caught them for a time, and Chris had been working for a tour company, while Krystal did clerical work in town. The year before they had traveled for some time in India (where they had got married) and Nepal, and they and Rachael fell into conversation about the different places they both had visited, while Richard and I were content to sit off to the side and listen. Krystal, though, would occasionally draw us back in by asking questions about our own particular travels.
Late, before bed, Richard and Chris took turns pointing out constellations. In the cold night we all stood away from the dying fire and looked and pointed up and tried to make sense of the star-filled sky.
Three kilometers brought us to the foot of the Heavitree Range, and we climbed to a saddle, dropped down onto the southern side, then turned west, walking through low open hills dotted with small blue mallee trees. By lunchtime we had reached Ellery Creek.
A dirt road comes into Ellery Creek, admitting visitors drawn by a large, permanent pool, Big Hole, that stops up a gap in the range. A small campground offers low wooden platforms, fire pits, and gas grills, as well as a bathroom with toilets but no sinks. The spigots of two large adjacent water tanks do little more than drip water, I suppose to discourage waste. Nonetheless, later in the afternoon Rachael and I managed to wash a few clothes; she filled a plastic shopping bag and did a proper job, while I settled on simply soaking and wringing out two shirts and two pairs of socks and a pair of underwear.
First, though, we retrieved our food box from a small locked closet in the bathroom building; Rachael had dropped off the box the week before. She used one of the grills to heat up mushroom soup for our lunch, and we spread peanut butter on thin, dense slabs of brown rye bread. A bevy of flies played around the rim of my bowl, landed on the bread and on my face--but I wasn't bothered, not too much. We had covered about 130 desert mountain kilometers in a week, settled in to carrying our belongings, to sleeping and eating out, and on this day we had reached a new food supply and a place with a few amenities, including the opportunity to clean up a bit. I was feeling good.
After lunch and laundry we repaired to Big Hole. A pair of ducks paddled about on one side, but soon disappeared into a tall stand of reeds. On the other side, big gum trees grew close to the edge, giving way where a cliff fell into the water. On the far side the pool narrowed into the gap. A sandy beach sloped down to our side of the pool, and Rachael was soon in the water, though not for more than five minutes. The pool was frigid, and while swimmers are common in summer they are apparently the exception in winter. Several groups of people came down while we sat beside the pool--a couple contingents of French, two men from Sydney on a tour of the Northern territory--but all were fully dressed in the sixtyish afternoon. They only laughed and shook their heads when asked if they planned to go in. I too had decided against the cold water, content instead to sit on the side in the sun and read a little Trollope. But I soon realized I would regret such timidity, and quickly, before I could change my mind, disrobed and ran and dove into the water. Just as quickly, and maybe more so, I turned around and clambered out of the shockingly cold water. Rachael chided me, "that hardly counts, you should have a swim." Oh, but it counted, and I'd had as much swim as I wanted. Drying in the sun felt wonderful.
At camp, Rachael chatted up a man from Alice, who was leading a small tour group at the end of its tour. He offered her some of the leftover food, including a loaf of white bread, a bag of tomatoes, a package of individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and a large pile of sliced ham wrapped in foil. Soon I was stuffing a large sandwich in my mouth, a treat that later effectively ruined my dinner (but it was corn soup, which I didn't like anyway). We had met another hiker, a man who had come in from the west soon after we arrived, and Rachael offered him some of our food bounty. He too had a big sandwich.
Later, this man, Richard, would share our fire. He was the only other American I met on the trail (not including the ex-pat Jo); most people were Australian, with a few British and western Europeans sprinkled in. As we went along, we would meet others who had met Richard, and everyone remembered him for his accent, which the Australians in particular found fascinating. Richard was from Tennessee and he spoke with a slow and distinctive southern drawl. I heard more than one person liken him to Forrest Gump, but Richard was a bit sharper.
Back in the States, he was a math professor at Tennessee Tech. He'd been teaching for twenty-six years and in three years would be eligible for retirement, which he planned to take. He said he wanted to see what it was like to travel in fall and winter and not just summer. In speaking of himself, he was reserved and circumspect, and we learned little more of his life in Tennessee. He did reveal that he had been to Australia four times, the first time to see a woman in Adelaide. Rachael asked about this woman, but only learned that Richard had met her at a conference in the States, and that on subsequent visits to Australia he had seen her but hadn't spent so much time in Adelaide as on the first visit. Twice he had taken seven weeks to hike the 1200-kilometer Heysen trail. "I just really liked it," he said, "so I did it again." That sounded a bit Gumpish to me, but I didn't say so out loud.
Just at dark, Krystal and Chris from Standley Chasm appeared. They had camped atop Brinkley Bluff three nights before, when we had been at Birthday Waterhole, and had been slowly gaining on us since. They shared our fire, as did Richard, and we all sat together long into the dark night. Chris gave an account of running the bulls in Pamplona, which he'd done a couple years past, but he downplayed the danger; he had worked at cattle stations in the Outback, and he said it was scarier getting in a truck and loading steers than it had been dashing from bulls in Spain. Krystal told us how Chris had recently won second place at the Camel Cup, an annual race in Alice Springs—though it had been his first time astride a camel. He had wanted her to do the "Honeymoon Race" with him, a relay in which the man rides the first half of the race, the woman the second. But she declined, saying she was not going to stand in the middle of the track with a herd of camels bearing down on her.
She and Chris had both been to the U.S., separately, Chris working on an itinerant agriculture crew of some sort in the Southwest, Krystal for International Student Volunteers, recruiting students at college campuses. University of Texas at Austin had been her favorite. They had left Sydney a couple months earlier, planning to move to Darwin, up on the north coast. But Alice had caught them for a time, and Chris had been working for a tour company, while Krystal did clerical work in town. The year before they had traveled for some time in India (where they had got married) and Nepal, and they and Rachael fell into conversation about the different places they both had visited, while Richard and I were content to sit off to the side and listen. Krystal, though, would occasionally draw us back in by asking questions about our own particular travels.
Late, before bed, Richard and Chris took turns pointing out constellations. In the cold night we all stood away from the dying fire and looked and pointed up and tried to make sense of the star-filled sky.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
We meet a number of women on the trail
Rather than "MacDonnell Range" one should more accurately say "ranges," as the MacDonnell consists of separate ridges, running parallel to each other with low, rolling acacia shrublands between. In the morning we set off southwest across a wide stretch of these lowlands, leaving the Chewings Range and heading towards the Heavitree Range twenty miles distant. The Chewings is more rugged and spectacular, as it has been squeezed and cracked by a number of big metamorphic episodes, while the Heavitree has experienced just one. In between, the low hills of shrubland are mostly gneiss, with a high mica content, and thus less resistant to weathering than the quartzite of the higher ranges. Witchetty bush dominates.
After days of deep gorges, rough climbs, and high ridges, the walk was rather plain, but it felt good to stretch my legs on the red dirt trail, up and down over the low hills, moving at a faster pace. I soon reached Hugh View and turned to look back three miles to Chewings, and to the narrow mouth of the big gorge. Soon after I paused at Ghost Gum Flat to end a brief, uncomfortable experiment with briefs and return to boxers.
Rachael and I came together for a rest at ten kilometers or so, and soon after met three women having a break of their own. We learned that the women had begun their walk just the day before, from Ellery Creek; they were walking eastwards, towards Alice. Their packs were big and crammed, with numerous items strapped on the outside; yet with all their supplies they had inadvertently--and apparently tragically--left behind their supply of chocolate. It was a lot of chocolate, they said, as chocolate had been considered a necessity. Rachael unshouldered her pack and presented them with half a large bar, for which they were volubly grateful.
One of the women, Jo, had a confusing accent. When she first spoke I thought she must be American, but then her pronunciation, and her word choice, seemed to mark her as Australian. It came out that she was originally from Virginia but had been a longtime resident of Australia--thus the distinctive Australican accent. She was a little older than the other two, late thirties to their middle twenties, and did most of the talking. One of the younger women, Karen, wore white pants that were already filthy; she didn't say much but showed the most pleasure and relief when the chocolate appeared. The third woman, Laura, carried a massive black pack, easily twice the size of mine. She wore three-quarter pants and was dark-haired and friendly and had a lovely smile, and we fell into a separate conversation, taking up the usual subjects, the path, water, campsites, future trail plans.
When we set off again I experienced something of a jar, as I regularly did after trail conversations. One moment I was meeting new people, talking as if at a party, and then I was back scuffing along a quiet trail in the big wide desert. Sometimes, though, trading with Rachael impressions and speculations of those we had met softened the transition.
We ate lunch sitting on a log by the water tank at Rocky Gully, the halfway point between the ranges. Here we met two more young women, Kay and Peta, in their mid-twenties, Outward Bound instructors on holiday; they had started at Mt. Sonder and were hiking eastwards. Peta looked experienced and competent, wearing a sensible red fleece jacket, her dark hair neatly plaited, well-worn boots on her feet, squint lines beside her eyes from having spent substantial time out under the sun. Kay was more the hippy hiker girl type, going barefoot at the gravelly campsite, with a sari draped on her blonde head, wearing a pair of baggy, dark blue men's pants. Her shirt was another sari held together with numerous safety pins, a garment of her and Peta's own creation and they were proud of the design. Kay was clearly tough, perfectly comfortable living outside, but quite fair, and she found it necessary to cover her arms and hands, especially during the long, hot afternoons of recent days.
When Kay discovered that Rachael had trained and worked as a midwife she made an excited sound, a brief intake of breath, and a cascade of questions followed. She had similar ambitions and had recently been looking into midwifery programs. Peta and I watched and listened to their conversation, then started our own, one inevitably secondary and less animated, as neither of us had quite the same stake as Kay. But I did want to know about her work, and she told me she'd been at Outward Bound for five years, and she was starting to lead groups, often corporate groups looking for challenge and adventure, and unlike Kay she had no intention of leaving the work anytime soon, she liked it.
After a time, Peta began trying to gently extricate Rachael from Kay's conversational clutches, saying, "I'm sure they need to be going." They were camping at Rocky Gully, but we planned to walk for a few more hours yet. In the following days we would repeatedly find their names in campsite logbooks, always with some appreciative and upbeat and exclamation mark-filled comment about the trail and the land--though one time Kay did write something slightly critical about people running their generators at night (this at one of the sites with road access).
The section between the two ranges, at thirty-one kilometers, can be traversed in a single day, and some hikers do just that. But most divide it in two, and Rachael and I decided to do so as well. We had already nearly covered the first half of the Larapinta, and faster than planned; yet we had as many as twelve more days (with a planned three day side trip) before our scheduled pick-up. Why rush, so we didn't.
We had filled our water bottles at Rocky Gulch, preparing for a dry camp. At twenty-three kilometers from Hugh Gorge, we struck off the trail and into a wide sandy wash. A quarter mile up we came to a likely spot beside a huge gum tree. I set up the tent in the sand using big rocks to hold the stakes in place, while Rachael collected a large pile of firewood, easy to do as branches and small logs were scattered all about. I had some reservations about camping in the wash--though we had camped in other washes on previous nights--especially as it had been mostly cloudy all day and clouds still filled the sky. But we decided to take a risk, if it was a risk.
We ate freeze-dried curry and rice for dinner and sat by the big fire late, caught by the flames; even after all the wood had burned down we lingered for some time, gazing at the glowing, pulsing embers.
After days of deep gorges, rough climbs, and high ridges, the walk was rather plain, but it felt good to stretch my legs on the red dirt trail, up and down over the low hills, moving at a faster pace. I soon reached Hugh View and turned to look back three miles to Chewings, and to the narrow mouth of the big gorge. Soon after I paused at Ghost Gum Flat to end a brief, uncomfortable experiment with briefs and return to boxers.
Rachael and I came together for a rest at ten kilometers or so, and soon after met three women having a break of their own. We learned that the women had begun their walk just the day before, from Ellery Creek; they were walking eastwards, towards Alice. Their packs were big and crammed, with numerous items strapped on the outside; yet with all their supplies they had inadvertently--and apparently tragically--left behind their supply of chocolate. It was a lot of chocolate, they said, as chocolate had been considered a necessity. Rachael unshouldered her pack and presented them with half a large bar, for which they were volubly grateful.
One of the women, Jo, had a confusing accent. When she first spoke I thought she must be American, but then her pronunciation, and her word choice, seemed to mark her as Australian. It came out that she was originally from Virginia but had been a longtime resident of Australia--thus the distinctive Australican accent. She was a little older than the other two, late thirties to their middle twenties, and did most of the talking. One of the younger women, Karen, wore white pants that were already filthy; she didn't say much but showed the most pleasure and relief when the chocolate appeared. The third woman, Laura, carried a massive black pack, easily twice the size of mine. She wore three-quarter pants and was dark-haired and friendly and had a lovely smile, and we fell into a separate conversation, taking up the usual subjects, the path, water, campsites, future trail plans.
When we set off again I experienced something of a jar, as I regularly did after trail conversations. One moment I was meeting new people, talking as if at a party, and then I was back scuffing along a quiet trail in the big wide desert. Sometimes, though, trading with Rachael impressions and speculations of those we had met softened the transition.
We ate lunch sitting on a log by the water tank at Rocky Gully, the halfway point between the ranges. Here we met two more young women, Kay and Peta, in their mid-twenties, Outward Bound instructors on holiday; they had started at Mt. Sonder and were hiking eastwards. Peta looked experienced and competent, wearing a sensible red fleece jacket, her dark hair neatly plaited, well-worn boots on her feet, squint lines beside her eyes from having spent substantial time out under the sun. Kay was more the hippy hiker girl type, going barefoot at the gravelly campsite, with a sari draped on her blonde head, wearing a pair of baggy, dark blue men's pants. Her shirt was another sari held together with numerous safety pins, a garment of her and Peta's own creation and they were proud of the design. Kay was clearly tough, perfectly comfortable living outside, but quite fair, and she found it necessary to cover her arms and hands, especially during the long, hot afternoons of recent days.
When Kay discovered that Rachael had trained and worked as a midwife she made an excited sound, a brief intake of breath, and a cascade of questions followed. She had similar ambitions and had recently been looking into midwifery programs. Peta and I watched and listened to their conversation, then started our own, one inevitably secondary and less animated, as neither of us had quite the same stake as Kay. But I did want to know about her work, and she told me she'd been at Outward Bound for five years, and she was starting to lead groups, often corporate groups looking for challenge and adventure, and unlike Kay she had no intention of leaving the work anytime soon, she liked it.
After a time, Peta began trying to gently extricate Rachael from Kay's conversational clutches, saying, "I'm sure they need to be going." They were camping at Rocky Gully, but we planned to walk for a few more hours yet. In the following days we would repeatedly find their names in campsite logbooks, always with some appreciative and upbeat and exclamation mark-filled comment about the trail and the land--though one time Kay did write something slightly critical about people running their generators at night (this at one of the sites with road access).
The section between the two ranges, at thirty-one kilometers, can be traversed in a single day, and some hikers do just that. But most divide it in two, and Rachael and I decided to do so as well. We had already nearly covered the first half of the Larapinta, and faster than planned; yet we had as many as twelve more days (with a planned three day side trip) before our scheduled pick-up. Why rush, so we didn't.
We had filled our water bottles at Rocky Gulch, preparing for a dry camp. At twenty-three kilometers from Hugh Gorge, we struck off the trail and into a wide sandy wash. A quarter mile up we came to a likely spot beside a huge gum tree. I set up the tent in the sand using big rocks to hold the stakes in place, while Rachael collected a large pile of firewood, easy to do as branches and small logs were scattered all about. I had some reservations about camping in the wash--though we had camped in other washes on previous nights--especially as it had been mostly cloudy all day and clouds still filled the sky. But we decided to take a risk, if it was a risk.
We ate freeze-dried curry and rice for dinner and sat by the big fire late, caught by the flames; even after all the wood had burned down we lingered for some time, gazing at the glowing, pulsing embers.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Spencer Gorge is awesome, Hugh Gorge too, but by Hugh I was pretty tired
Clouds filled the sky in the morning, and I wondered if I would have to use my rain gear. But no. The clouds burned off by midday, and I once again donned sunglasses and sunscreen.
The day began with a beautiful gorge and ended with another, with a long high ridge traverse in between. The perfect MacDonnell mix. We would walk just under ten miles in just under ten hours, boulder hopping in the gorges, picking our way carefully along the sharp, exposed ridges, using nearly all of the winter light. A day of sublime landscapes, of views both enclosed and open.
The narrow Spencer Gorge came first, in the cloudy early morning—what had been an initially small fracture, invaded by magma impossibly long ago, magma that cooled to relatively soft dolorite, which was slowly slowly eroded away, forming the gap. The striking red walls contrasted starkly in the flat light with the pale stones and boulders scattered on the bottom. We picked our way among the rocks and among an array of cycads, big gum trees, cypress pines, mintbush trees, and some sort of wattle, a green shrub with small yellow flowers. Rachael walked ahead and I fell behind, stopping often to revel. I wanted the gorge to go on and on.
Later, up high, the quartzite spine of Razorback Ridge was alarmingly narrow at spots, with long drop-offs on either side providing a not unpleasant frisson of danger. Ahead we could see the rest of our day, the valley we would descend into, its rising course to a saddle, and a mountain-ringed bowl beyond.
At Fringe Lily Creek (creek-less, of course), at the foot of the hot and precipitous and ridiculously crumbly descent from the ridge, we luncheoned in the shade of a gum tree. Naan with peanut butter and/or Laughing Cow.
Up the valley I surged ahead and soon passed two hikers separated by a couple hundred yards, a man and a woman who I thought must be a couple but they weren’t, as I later learned. I only said hello, but Rachael would stop to talk. The man was in the midst of ten months devoted to Australia long-distance hiking. He had already walked the Heysen Trail down in south Australia (near Adelaide and 1200 kilometers in length), and was soon heading to Western Australia to walk the Bibbulmun Track (1000 kilometers, with Perth at the north end). I wished I'd stopped and talked with him too.
At the head of the valley I made the demanding climb up to Rocky Saddle, from where I could see back over the trail for some distance. I sat down to wait for Rachael . . . but she did not come. After a half hour I had almost decided to go back to look for her, even though I did not want to make the climb again; I thought something must be wrong. Then I saw her pink jumper far below, and settled in with my book to wait. She had been in conversation with the man and woman (and later shared their stories with me), and one experiences time much differently when chatting versus worrying.
We descended once again, into the day’s second and final gap, Hugh Gorge, a much larger and longer defile, with towering walls and several pools of still green water. The trail came into the gorge at an open spot, Hugh Junction, where we stopped to rest at a handsome sandy campsite in the midst of a gum tree copse. We sat down on logs beside a fire ring, and a few minutes later an older couple appeared. They had walked only four kilometers up from the mouth of the gorge, where they had camped the previous night, but the woman looked as if she'd had all she could take for the day. They asked a few circumspect questions about the campsite, obviously hoping to stay but not wanting to trespass on our prior claim.
We assured them that we were going on, and then Rachael got them talking about themselves. They were long-time Australians, living in Perth, but their accents revealed other origins: he had come out from England thirty years previous, she from Ireland. He was a small compact man, in his late fifties, wearing a brown baseball cap with the letters N and R. While he looked fit and lively, his wife appeared done in. She was a small person too, stout and matronly, with short gray hair, convertible khaki pants and two walking sticks she leaned on heavily. She was sweating and looked as if she had been for some time. She shook her head when asked of their recent days on the trail. Her expression was haggard but her sense of humor intact. “Fifteen days,” she said with a wry and exhausted smile, as if in disbelief. "I haven't done anything like this before," she said, and then inclined her head towards her husband. "But he insisted it wouldn't be too difficult." She laughed, a sort of "ha!" and her laugh was both self-deprecating and a little angry. She tapped a knee with one of her poles and said she wasn’t sure she was going to make it all the way to Alice Springs. The man chuckled cajolingly, as if to say, “oh, you’ll do fine.” She gave a tight-lipped smile and looked down at the ground and shook her head.
We left the campsite to them and headed down the gorge, into the narrow passage and out of the sunlight. The quartzite cliffs on either side of the canyon are riven with cracks, and big chunks of rock—sometimes as big as a car or even a house—have broken off and dropped into the bottom. The cliffs are orangey with orange oxide, but once fallen from the sides the rock soon become bleached and waterworn. We could weave among the large boulders, but smaller stones carpeted the floor, and we wearily picked our way over the often loose rocks. Several times we passed small pools, where floods had gouged out smooth, oblong bowls. At times these pools are much larger, and hikers must wade them on the down canyon hike; but for us there was room to get around dry-shod.
The sun had set by the time we came out of the canyon, where several other hikers (eastward bound) were camped. They had set up just at the mouth, but we walked a bit further out onto a sandy alluvial fan covered with small trees. We settled on a spot with a fire ring and immediately began casting about for firewood. Once we'd collected enough for the evening, I put up the tent while Rachael made the fire and started dinner. We had freeze-dried vegetariano pasta, and I could've eaten much more than my single small bowl. My appetite was recovering after having been suppressed by exhaustion for the first days of the hike.
After dark, the waning moon did not rise quite as soon as on previous nights, and the sky filled with stars and swathes of the Milky Way. Several shooting stars fell across the sky, including one with a long tail, like a sparkler crackling over the mountains.
The day began with a beautiful gorge and ended with another, with a long high ridge traverse in between. The perfect MacDonnell mix. We would walk just under ten miles in just under ten hours, boulder hopping in the gorges, picking our way carefully along the sharp, exposed ridges, using nearly all of the winter light. A day of sublime landscapes, of views both enclosed and open.
The narrow Spencer Gorge came first, in the cloudy early morning—what had been an initially small fracture, invaded by magma impossibly long ago, magma that cooled to relatively soft dolorite, which was slowly slowly eroded away, forming the gap. The striking red walls contrasted starkly in the flat light with the pale stones and boulders scattered on the bottom. We picked our way among the rocks and among an array of cycads, big gum trees, cypress pines, mintbush trees, and some sort of wattle, a green shrub with small yellow flowers. Rachael walked ahead and I fell behind, stopping often to revel. I wanted the gorge to go on and on.
Later, up high, the quartzite spine of Razorback Ridge was alarmingly narrow at spots, with long drop-offs on either side providing a not unpleasant frisson of danger. Ahead we could see the rest of our day, the valley we would descend into, its rising course to a saddle, and a mountain-ringed bowl beyond.
At Fringe Lily Creek (creek-less, of course), at the foot of the hot and precipitous and ridiculously crumbly descent from the ridge, we luncheoned in the shade of a gum tree. Naan with peanut butter and/or Laughing Cow.
Up the valley I surged ahead and soon passed two hikers separated by a couple hundred yards, a man and a woman who I thought must be a couple but they weren’t, as I later learned. I only said hello, but Rachael would stop to talk. The man was in the midst of ten months devoted to Australia long-distance hiking. He had already walked the Heysen Trail down in south Australia (near Adelaide and 1200 kilometers in length), and was soon heading to Western Australia to walk the Bibbulmun Track (1000 kilometers, with Perth at the north end). I wished I'd stopped and talked with him too.
At the head of the valley I made the demanding climb up to Rocky Saddle, from where I could see back over the trail for some distance. I sat down to wait for Rachael . . . but she did not come. After a half hour I had almost decided to go back to look for her, even though I did not want to make the climb again; I thought something must be wrong. Then I saw her pink jumper far below, and settled in with my book to wait. She had been in conversation with the man and woman (and later shared their stories with me), and one experiences time much differently when chatting versus worrying.
We descended once again, into the day’s second and final gap, Hugh Gorge, a much larger and longer defile, with towering walls and several pools of still green water. The trail came into the gorge at an open spot, Hugh Junction, where we stopped to rest at a handsome sandy campsite in the midst of a gum tree copse. We sat down on logs beside a fire ring, and a few minutes later an older couple appeared. They had walked only four kilometers up from the mouth of the gorge, where they had camped the previous night, but the woman looked as if she'd had all she could take for the day. They asked a few circumspect questions about the campsite, obviously hoping to stay but not wanting to trespass on our prior claim.
We assured them that we were going on, and then Rachael got them talking about themselves. They were long-time Australians, living in Perth, but their accents revealed other origins: he had come out from England thirty years previous, she from Ireland. He was a small compact man, in his late fifties, wearing a brown baseball cap with the letters N and R. While he looked fit and lively, his wife appeared done in. She was a small person too, stout and matronly, with short gray hair, convertible khaki pants and two walking sticks she leaned on heavily. She was sweating and looked as if she had been for some time. She shook her head when asked of their recent days on the trail. Her expression was haggard but her sense of humor intact. “Fifteen days,” she said with a wry and exhausted smile, as if in disbelief. "I haven't done anything like this before," she said, and then inclined her head towards her husband. "But he insisted it wouldn't be too difficult." She laughed, a sort of "ha!" and her laugh was both self-deprecating and a little angry. She tapped a knee with one of her poles and said she wasn’t sure she was going to make it all the way to Alice Springs. The man chuckled cajolingly, as if to say, “oh, you’ll do fine.” She gave a tight-lipped smile and looked down at the ground and shook her head.
We left the campsite to them and headed down the gorge, into the narrow passage and out of the sunlight. The quartzite cliffs on either side of the canyon are riven with cracks, and big chunks of rock—sometimes as big as a car or even a house—have broken off and dropped into the bottom. The cliffs are orangey with orange oxide, but once fallen from the sides the rock soon become bleached and waterworn. We could weave among the large boulders, but smaller stones carpeted the floor, and we wearily picked our way over the often loose rocks. Several times we passed small pools, where floods had gouged out smooth, oblong bowls. At times these pools are much larger, and hikers must wade them on the down canyon hike; but for us there was room to get around dry-shod.
The sun had set by the time we came out of the canyon, where several other hikers (eastward bound) were camped. They had set up just at the mouth, but we walked a bit further out onto a sandy alluvial fan covered with small trees. We settled on a spot with a fire ring and immediately began casting about for firewood. Once we'd collected enough for the evening, I put up the tent while Rachael made the fire and started dinner. We had freeze-dried vegetariano pasta, and I could've eaten much more than my single small bowl. My appetite was recovering after having been suppressed by exhaustion for the first days of the hike.
After dark, the waning moon did not rise quite as soon as on previous nights, and the sky filled with stars and swathes of the Milky Way. Several shooting stars fell across the sky, including one with a long tail, like a sparkler crackling over the mountains.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
I'm attached to my walking stick
At Reveal Saddle, six kilometers up from our early morning start, Rachael found she had bars on her cellphone. She texted her daughter, then called a friend in Alice.
Soon after, I lost the trail on a short descent and we were forced to traverse a difficult and steep slope, where sharp brown slates of rock stood up in thin crumbly layers, and spiky spinifex grass grew in the interstices. Rachael said, "I think I should go first."
Back on the path, we climbed onto a long ridge, and slowly gained elevation as we walked westwards towards the high point at Brinkley Bluff. We met other hikers and paused to chat, Rachael leading the conversational way. Most people on the Larapinta were ready to talk, at least briefly about the trail, campsites, food—but with Rachael a few words often turned into many, as the topics branched out and became more interesting. She would ask pointed questions, often beginning with, “Where are you from?” As a person’s biographical details emerged, Rachael didn’t hesitate to follow up, to ask how long the person had lived in Sydney, whether she liked it, what she did for a living, how she felt about her job, if she had children, and if she’d had a difficult birth with her third and handicapped child.
These questions did not come across as nosy; on the contrary, Rachael’s frank curiosity and interest seemed to disarm people. They would settle in, lean on a walking stick or shift their pack into a more comfortable position, and begin to recite their stories. I stood to the side and listened, occasionally putting a word or question in myself—but mostly Rachael asked just the questions I was wanting to ask myself.
On the ridge we first met Adam, one of the few solo hikers we’d come upon. He was a large unshaven man, in his thirties, wearing unzipped knee-length gaiters and a t-shirt soaked with perspiration. The night before he had camped at Birthday Waterhole, in the wash, and in the middle of the night a band of brumbies (wild horses) had come pounding down the wash where he was camped, and he had raised up from his sleeping bag and crouched at the mouth of his tent, waving his headlamp and shouting; the horses had split and dashed around his tent on either side. (There are over 400,000 brumbies in Australia, most of them in the Northern Territory.)
A few minutes after Adam we met two late middle-aged couples who had been on the trail from Mt. Sonder fifteen days, taking their time, and who all wielded two walking sticks. The men, like all the men we met on the trail, looked liked vagabonds, with their gray unshaven faces and dirty clothes; somehow the women—and this was generally the case—managed to look cleaner and more tidy, their faces and clothes cleaner, their hair neatly in place. One of the men was originally from Yorkshire—Rachael guessed his accent and guessed correctly—but had been living in New Zealand for some years, which he talked about at length, prompted by Rachael.
We came to several false peaks before reaching Brinkley Bluff, the top marked by a tall stone and cement cairn. The wind was blowing hard and we cast about for a protected spot to eat lunch. First, though, we talked to another couple, this one younger and fresher looking than the last two. The man was originally from the UK, from Essex, and he and Rachael fell into trading familiar place names of the south of England. Both the man and the woman were wearing down jackets in the cold wind. They worked as environmental educators in Victoria, and planned to camp up on the bluff for the night.
But we started down after lunch. The descent was almost horizontal, or so it seemed. After what seemed a long long time we reached a saddle, then began descending again in a narrow gully full of boulders and cycads, then climbed again to Stuart’s Pass, then began a last and even longer descent into a valley far below. Though we walked only eighteen kilometers on this day (about eleven miles), the section took most all of the daylight, about nine hours, to negotiate.
Actually, I ended up adding a bonus five k to my day. Later, when we were almost to Birthday Hole (home for the night), I realized I had left my walking stick behind. I set down my pack, told Rachael I’d meet her at the campsite, grabbed a bottle of water from the side pocket, then set off at a jog retracing my steps. There wasn’t much daylight left, and I had a race on my hands. But I really wanted that walking stick.
I figured I’d left it fifteen minutes back at our last stop, Mintbush Spring (more of a seep, but a relatively lush, wooded patch just the same). Typically I’d lean the stick against my pack so I wouldn’t forget it, but apparently that hadn’t been the case. I think I was distracted by the dead cow near the spring, when Rachael had asked me to walk between her and the carcass so she didn’t have to see it.
But when I got back to the spring I couldn’t find the stick.
I could’ve given up, but no, I wanted that stick. So I kept going back, now running down the sandy trail, along the side of the wide valley. I stopped when I saw a big kangaroo, a euro, and we stared at each other for a long minute ... and then both carried on. When I reached the next former rest stop I thought for sure I’d find the stick, even knew exactly where I’d put it, against a witchetty bush next to a big gum tree—but no, it wasn’t there. I looked and looked, unable to accept that it wasn’t where I knew it had to be. I cast about in the shadowy light, thinking, “fuck!”
And then I gave up and started jogging back. Along the way I convinced myself that it had to be at Mintbush Spring, as I’d originally thought; it had to be, there was no other explanation. And indeed the stick was there. I just hadn’t seen it the first time, I don’t know why.
I reached camp in the last of the day’s light. Rachael had gathered firewood and started a fire, next to a large flat boulder on the edge of a sandy wash. I put the tent up off to the side and she made freeze-dried dinner. When I first arrived back I had held the stick over my head in triumph and whooped, and Rachael smiled because she had to.
Soon after, I lost the trail on a short descent and we were forced to traverse a difficult and steep slope, where sharp brown slates of rock stood up in thin crumbly layers, and spiky spinifex grass grew in the interstices. Rachael said, "I think I should go first."
Back on the path, we climbed onto a long ridge, and slowly gained elevation as we walked westwards towards the high point at Brinkley Bluff. We met other hikers and paused to chat, Rachael leading the conversational way. Most people on the Larapinta were ready to talk, at least briefly about the trail, campsites, food—but with Rachael a few words often turned into many, as the topics branched out and became more interesting. She would ask pointed questions, often beginning with, “Where are you from?” As a person’s biographical details emerged, Rachael didn’t hesitate to follow up, to ask how long the person had lived in Sydney, whether she liked it, what she did for a living, how she felt about her job, if she had children, and if she’d had a difficult birth with her third and handicapped child.
These questions did not come across as nosy; on the contrary, Rachael’s frank curiosity and interest seemed to disarm people. They would settle in, lean on a walking stick or shift their pack into a more comfortable position, and begin to recite their stories. I stood to the side and listened, occasionally putting a word or question in myself—but mostly Rachael asked just the questions I was wanting to ask myself.
On the ridge we first met Adam, one of the few solo hikers we’d come upon. He was a large unshaven man, in his thirties, wearing unzipped knee-length gaiters and a t-shirt soaked with perspiration. The night before he had camped at Birthday Waterhole, in the wash, and in the middle of the night a band of brumbies (wild horses) had come pounding down the wash where he was camped, and he had raised up from his sleeping bag and crouched at the mouth of his tent, waving his headlamp and shouting; the horses had split and dashed around his tent on either side. (There are over 400,000 brumbies in Australia, most of them in the Northern Territory.)
A few minutes after Adam we met two late middle-aged couples who had been on the trail from Mt. Sonder fifteen days, taking their time, and who all wielded two walking sticks. The men, like all the men we met on the trail, looked liked vagabonds, with their gray unshaven faces and dirty clothes; somehow the women—and this was generally the case—managed to look cleaner and more tidy, their faces and clothes cleaner, their hair neatly in place. One of the men was originally from Yorkshire—Rachael guessed his accent and guessed correctly—but had been living in New Zealand for some years, which he talked about at length, prompted by Rachael.
We came to several false peaks before reaching Brinkley Bluff, the top marked by a tall stone and cement cairn. The wind was blowing hard and we cast about for a protected spot to eat lunch. First, though, we talked to another couple, this one younger and fresher looking than the last two. The man was originally from the UK, from Essex, and he and Rachael fell into trading familiar place names of the south of England. Both the man and the woman were wearing down jackets in the cold wind. They worked as environmental educators in Victoria, and planned to camp up on the bluff for the night.
But we started down after lunch. The descent was almost horizontal, or so it seemed. After what seemed a long long time we reached a saddle, then began descending again in a narrow gully full of boulders and cycads, then climbed again to Stuart’s Pass, then began a last and even longer descent into a valley far below. Though we walked only eighteen kilometers on this day (about eleven miles), the section took most all of the daylight, about nine hours, to negotiate.
Actually, I ended up adding a bonus five k to my day. Later, when we were almost to Birthday Hole (home for the night), I realized I had left my walking stick behind. I set down my pack, told Rachael I’d meet her at the campsite, grabbed a bottle of water from the side pocket, then set off at a jog retracing my steps. There wasn’t much daylight left, and I had a race on my hands. But I really wanted that walking stick.
I figured I’d left it fifteen minutes back at our last stop, Mintbush Spring (more of a seep, but a relatively lush, wooded patch just the same). Typically I’d lean the stick against my pack so I wouldn’t forget it, but apparently that hadn’t been the case. I think I was distracted by the dead cow near the spring, when Rachael had asked me to walk between her and the carcass so she didn’t have to see it.
But when I got back to the spring I couldn’t find the stick.
I could’ve given up, but no, I wanted that stick. So I kept going back, now running down the sandy trail, along the side of the wide valley. I stopped when I saw a big kangaroo, a euro, and we stared at each other for a long minute ... and then both carried on. When I reached the next former rest stop I thought for sure I’d find the stick, even knew exactly where I’d put it, against a witchetty bush next to a big gum tree—but no, it wasn’t there. I looked and looked, unable to accept that it wasn’t where I knew it had to be. I cast about in the shadowy light, thinking, “fuck!”
And then I gave up and started jogging back. Along the way I convinced myself that it had to be at Mintbush Spring, as I’d originally thought; it had to be, there was no other explanation. And indeed the stick was there. I just hadn’t seen it the first time, I don’t know why.
I reached camp in the last of the day’s light. Rachael had gathered firewood and started a fire, next to a large flat boulder on the edge of a sandy wash. I put the tent up off to the side and she made freeze-dried dinner. When I first arrived back I had held the stick over my head in triumph and whooped, and Rachael smiled because she had to.
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