Full moon at Mulga Camp

In the cold cold morning in the first pale light of dawn I rose and put on all the clothing in my pack, which isn’t a lot but enough. The first part of the day’s walk led us over a flat dotted with bloodwood and ironwood trees sticking up above the cover of low brush.

The sun rose over the eastern hills, and soon we came to a short side trail. We put down our packs and headed up towards Scorpion Pool, which lay in the shadow of a steep ridge; a pair of euros, or hill kangaroos, fled at our approach, moving with surprising speed and agility over rough and bouldery ground. They paused at a low rise to look back at us, then turned and disappeared over the top. The pool was a tiny and black and evil-looking patch of water perched up at the head of a rocky bowl; a single spray of green reeds grew on one side, and a sickly white, scum-covered grass lay along the bottom beneath the shallow water. Scattered in the rocks all about were the carcasses of a half dozen kangaroos, small piles of brown fur and bones, one mixed together with the remains of a dingo.

At the first dead kangaroo Rachael had put a hand over her mouth and turned back. She sat down on a nearby rock, back away from the dead and the smell, while I went on and yelled back at her each time I found another euro. Later she said the place felt wrong to her, as if she shouldn’t be there.

We returned to our packs and continued westwards, and soon came under the cool shadow of Rungutirba Ridge.

Ten kilometers of morning walking brought us to Simpson’s Gap, a dramatic red cut in the West MacDonnell Range; a substantial pool of water glittered in the sun and filled the bottom from wall to wall. Over the course of the walk we would come upon a number of these gaps or gorges, all made by north-south running rivers slicing across the range. These desert “rivers” are nothing but sandy washes most of the time—except for the occasional pool—but the beds can fill quickly in flash floods, and that’s when the carving takes place.

The MacDonnells is essentially an anticline, formed 300 million years ago when layers of much older rock were squeezed from north and south and pushed upwards, tipping the rock on its sides and creating the long ridges. Initially the range was as high as the Rockies, but time has whittled it down considerably, and today the highest peaks are four to five thousand feet. Some of the rock layers have been more resistant to erosion than others, resulting, according to a local field guide, in “a land of edges,” especially along the ridge tops. Beautiful but often tough on the feet.

A road dead-ends at Simpson’s Gap, and there were a few utes (pick-ups with caps) and RVs in a dirt parking lot, and bathrooms and picnic tables too. Rachael, tougher than me, sat at a table in the sun; I chose a roofed table nearby and spread cheese and bread and a tangerine and carrots out on a red bandana.

Soon two other hikers appeared from the west, two men who had been on the trail ten days. Peter wore a khaki shirt, unbuttoned all the way and streaked with ragged white lines of salty perspiration. He took off his hat and his few wisps of hair clung to his sweaty pate. Niven, who wore dusty knee high gaiters but otherwise looked not a bit discomposed, set his pack on a bench, pulled out from a pocket a small blue sheet of plastic, lay it on the ground, then set his pack carefully down upon the sheet. He took out his bottle of water and watched me putting on a new pair of socks. “That’s the last time those’ll be white, mate.” Yes, even within a couple hours they were deeply and irreparably stained with the land’s red dirt.

The two men were from Canberra, and we talked about the trail, they with authority, me not so much. Niven was treating all his water, from the water tanks, while Peter was not. Neither of them had felt any ill effects. I was treating too, with Aqua Pura, but Rachael wasn’t bothering.

After lunch we carried on eight kilometers to Bond Gap. The afternoon had grown brutally hot, probably in the high eighties, without a bit of shade to hide under. The cold pool at Bond Gap, and the big river red gums looming overhead, offered a welcome respite. A small blue-black and white bird, a willie wagtail, played around the edge of the pool, consuming flies, but not enough of them; the surplus attended to my mouth and nose and eyes.

We stopped for the day at Mulga Camp, after covering about twenty-five kilometers. A picnic table, two small water tanks, and an outhouse stood among a sparse glade of mulga trees; the pale dirt had been pulverized into dust by a steady stream of previous campers.

I washed socks and put up the tent; Rachael climbed a nearby ridge to watch the full moon rise in the east. Later she made freeze-dried pad thai for dinner, but I wouldn’t recommend it. We had a fire, which is technically illegal on the Larapinta, but the ashy remnants of previous fires showed we weren’t the first transgressors. The dark wasn’t particularly dark after the moon appeared above the ridge. I felt tired and achy and a little melancholy. The maps describe the first two sections as “medium,” tomorrow’s as “hard,” the section after that as “very hard.”

I woke several times in the night, tracking the passage of time by the moon, which moved upwards from my feet, arching overhead and falling slowly towards the head of the tent and then, at dawn, into the hills behind.