First day on the Larapinta Trail

[After the Larapinta Trail hike, which ended up taking fourteen days, I wrote entries for the days on the trail]

Yesterday in Alice, just outside the Yeperenye Shopping Centre, I came upon the late stage of a struggle between two men. A white, late middle-aged security guard with a red moustache was sitting on the back of a prone and similarly aged Aboriginal man and pulling back on his arms. The white man was furious. “You want to fucking scratch me?" he said. "You want to fucking scratch me now?”

The Aboriginal man lifted his head and bellowed “get off! I can’t breathe!”

The security guard said, “Good, possibly you’ll die.”

I wanted to stop and watch but walked a half block before pausing to look back. Across the street from me a large contingent of Aboriginal people stood in one of their regular gathering spots. They too were watching the drama by the Shopping Centre door. They talked quietly among themselves, but no one moved towards the incident.

The security guard remained on the other man’s back for some time. When three other white people finally appeared the guard got up and stood over the Aboriginal man, who sat up but didn’t rise further. One of the newly arrived whites leaned over and yelled something in the seated man’s face. I finally walked away.

In the middle of the morning we set off from Rachael’s house carrying our backpacks. The sun was hot, a flock of noisy galahs crowded the branches of a neighbor’s gum tree, and our packs felt surprisingly heavy. My gear is almost all lightweight, but still, piece by piece it adds up. Plus we carried a substantial amount of water—about three and a half liters each—as well as food for four days. As on any backpacking trip, the load would slowly come to seem less oppressive, but it was a bit of a shock to start off.

We walked four kilometers through the east side of town, through residential neighborhoods and across the broad fields of a school, to the Todd River, and followed its sandy course to Telegraph Station park, the official start of the Larapinta Trail.

I topped off one of my water bottles, and we sat in the last bit of shade we’d see for the day, watching magpie larks and grey-crowned babblers pick about in the grass. In the trees roosted several Australian ringnecks--crow-sized parrots, green and yellow with black heads. Two women and a half dozen children appeared, and while one woman followed the kids down to the sandy wash the other began grilling meat on one of the gas barbecues scattered around the park. The Telegraph Station used to serve as a “school” for half caste children taken from their Aboriginal families (such removal was state policy for much of the 20th century).

The first portion of the trail was rather flat and plain, and roughly followed the original primitive road that linked Adelaide and Darwin. A better road replaced it in 1930, and eventually evolved into today’s paved Stuart Highway. After five kilometers we passed under a bridge of the Stuart and climbed into rolling hills covered with low brush and boulders.

We crossed railroad tracks and soon after met a Swiss couple just finishing the trail. Most people, it turns out, walk the Larapinta from west to east, finishing rather than starting in Alice. This we would decide was a mistake, as ending with Mt. Sonder, the western terminus and the highest point on the trail, would promise a more dramatic and satisfying end than simply arriving in town.

The only other people we saw on the trail this first day were three “old birds” (to use Rachael’s phrase), women at least in their sixties and probably older. Their faces and bare arms were dark from the sun and age. They looked hot and tired but tough too, up to the demands of long days of desert walking. A guide accompanied them, a large and much younger Amazon with calves considerably thicker and more muscular than my thighs. She gave me a hearty, patronizing greeting, said something about how clean I looked, and then laughed with friendly disdain. We would have to earn trail respect, it seemed.

We climbed steadily and then steeply towards and along Euro Ridge (euro is the name of the region’s largest and most common kangaroo). The ridge line was punctuated by high points, ramp-like on one side, rising to overhangs with scary drop-offs on the other. I found myself wishing the trail would simply traverse these ramps, but instead it climbed up to each point and ran right along the crumbly edge. The afternoon temperature had risen into the upper eighties, and my head felt feverish; the hot water in my water bottle provided little relief.

About four, tired and hot, we reached Wallaby Gap, a wide flat space between two hills. We’d come about eighteen kilometers, with three rest stops; we debated whether or not to go on another ten kilometers to Simpson’s Gap. We decided to stop, and this was the right decision.

Along the Larapinta there are a number of established campsites, and hikers are encouraged to use them and they mostly do. The amenities at a site vary, but water is of course the most important and thus the most common. Most campsites have water tanks, of various sizes, that are periodically filled by water trucks that bump in on rugged dirt two-tracks which are closed to the public. Without these water tanks the trail would be difficult to negotiate, especially during a year like the current one, when rain has been scarce and the natural water sources have shrunk considerably or even disappeared. Most of the water pools we came across were quite murky and buggy and unappetizing, and I was happy to not have to rely on them.

While some campsites have nothing more than water tanks, a few also have picnic tables and even gas grills (for these the water trucks bring in propane tanks). At Wallaby Gap there was indeed a gas grill, as well as a roofed structure with benches beneath, and two low flat tables/sleeping platforms (these seatless tables are for some reason popular at parks in central Australia). We used one low table for cooking, the other for sleeping.

For dinner we ate bread and cheese and hummus and drank lots of water. And Rachael made tea. After the sun went down we walked up into the gap, a small canyon with rough and pale stone walls. Boulders clogged the floor and among them grew small corkwood and gum trees. A few kangaroo bones were littered about, along with a whole lot of kangaroo droppings, brown pellets the size of Halloween tootsie rolls.

I climbed out of the canyon and sat down on a boulder. The nearly full moon stood over Euro Ridge to the east. All was still and quiet and the temperature had dropped; I gazed out over the ancient hills, the slopes dotted with mounds of dry grass, with spindly mulga trees. Lovely and strange, and I wondered how I fit in because I didn’t.

Back in camp we got into our sleeping bags, exhausted. It was only seven. The moon lit the world except where the dark shadows of bushes fell across the silvered ground.