Mrs. Mac's Beef Pies are good, at least initially

In the morning gloaming I broke down the tent while Rachael heated water for tea and muesli. She packed and set off first; ten minutes later I cast about the campsite to make sure nothing had been forgotten, and then followed her.

During the day we seldom walked together. One or the other would take the lead, and soon a distance of a hundred yards, maybe even a half mile, would separate us. Every hour or two we would come together again for a short rest, to drink or snack, me to remove my boots and socks and air my feet, and to talk about what we had seen and what we had been thinking about.

I met couples who never seemed to stray more than a few steps from each other, but I liked a bit of solitude to leaven all the Larapinta togetherness. Every moment shared, from rising in the cold morning, to laying down at night, and even then—I haven’t the stamina for such coupling, nor can I imagine I’m interesting enough to sustain it. For years I’ve backpacked alone, yet I don’t necessarily prefer a solo walk; on the contrary, I was glad to trade lonely evenings for Rachael’s good company and fire-making skills. But I still had my limitations.

Early mornings are best for walking alone. Actually, early mornings are best for pretty much everything out under the sky. I always feel strongest, often even euphoric in the cool of the first hours after sunrise, when the sun is still low, the light new and fresh and promising. The path rose to a low ridge, and I looked out over the strange yellow and red land with hope and appreciation, rather than the doubt and skepticism that so often attends the end of a day. I much prefer the sun in the east to the sun in the west.

The trail descended and passed into Spring Gap, where the big hooves of many cows had churned up the the sandy bottom. Each footfall brought one in contact with bits of dried turd. Most of the Larapinta runs within the boundaries of West MacDonnell National Park, but a few portions are on Aboriginal land, which sometimes include cattle stations. A small muddied pool in the middle of the gap had been trampled all around the edges and smelled of cow shit. Big river red gum trees were scattered along the bottom too, and paler and smaller ghost gums grew out of the rock on the sides of the gap.

Beyond the gap we walked for the first time on the north side of the West MacDonnells. The high ridge of the Chewings Range, the portion of the MacDonnells we would walk for the first five or six days, ran along my left, and before me to the west I could see for dozens of miles, out across gently rolling hills covered with mulga and witchetty bush—the latter a tall, funnel-shaped shrub with small pale green leaves, though often dead or burned, and named for the white finger-length grubs that live in its roots and that the Aborigines valued as a food treat, eating them raw or roasted. Reportedly, they taste like scrambled eggs.

At Jay Creek, the next cut through the mountains, we came upon a dusty campsite with sleeping platform and two large water tanks. Rachael was waiting for me, but went on soon after I appeared, while I paused to fill my water bottles. A white pick-up was parked beside one of the tanks, and I asked the man standing beside the truck about the road in—he said, forty kilometers of very rough two-track. Then he had some questions for me. He wanted to know which direction I was going, and if I was traveling alone, and where I intended to stop for the night; he seemed to suspect me of being up to no good. But I understood: he had just dropped off his wife and she was heading west, like me, on a day hike nine rugged and isolated miles to Standley Chasm. I didn’t come out and say it, but I tried to reassure him via tone and body language that I would not hurt her.

Halfway through the Jay Creek cut Rachael and I stopped for lunch at Fish Hole, another small pool, this one rocky along the edges but also littered with cow droppings. After eating we had to take a steep and difficult trail up out of the canyon to get around the water hole, a path first constructed one hundred years ago to accommodate camel trains.

The second part of the day was much more strenuous than the first. The cut turned up into a deep valley that led west through the middle rather than along the side of the Chewings Range. At the head of the valley we clambered up a steep ravine clogged with big boulders and cycads. Just at the top we had to climb a short wall, traverse a foot-wide shelf of rock, then squeeze through a narrow stone slot. On the far side we descended through a red rock chasm, far down, losing all the elevation we’d gained, before beginning to climb again up another valley.

We came upon the woman on the day hike. She had lost the trail and was wandering up on the slope to our left, gingerly picking a way through mounds of pokey spinifex grass. When she saw Rachael, who was in the lead, she said, “Could you wait there for me, please?” Rachael stopped and the woman turned downhill towards the path; I kept walking, in part because I’m less sociable, in part because I wanted to reassure the woman’s husband.

The path reached another saddle and then dropped precipitously for a mile to Angkale Junction, where the trail turned south and entered Standley Chasm—one of the deepest of the gorges on the Larapinta.

In the late day the canyon bottom was cool and shaded, and we walked over a pavement of stones, between massive chunks of red rock fallen from the high red walls. The gorge narrowed and twisted, and I was put in mind of the upper reaches of Rattlesnake Canyon in the Anza-Borrego in California. Actually, I was constantly comparing the MacDonnells with the Anza-Borrego, though one significant difference is that no cactus grow in Central Australia, I don’t know why.

I was pretty worn out with the long day of up and down, but at least, I thought as I walked through Standley, it’s all downhill from here. But no. A high drop-off lower down the chasm required a long and annoyingly difficult detour, straight up the side of the canyon, down into a side cut, up again, before the last descent to the southern end of the chasm.

Standley is on Aboriginal land, and a road leads up to the southern mouth. Here is a small snack bar and a dirt parking lot, in among a stand of huge gum trees. Along one side of the parking lot is a narrow strip of short, spiky grass—the campground. At the snack bar I paid the eight dollar camping fee and bought a bottle of coke for $3.50. We also picked up our first food drop, a packed cardboard box Rachael had left behind the counter a week before.

Rachael fell into conversation with a chatty young couple sitting at a table on the snack bar patio while I, sweaty and worn out, kept off to the side and enjoyed the sweet and icy-cold Coca-Cola. The couple were heading west on the trail like us, but had spent a rest day at Standley Chasm, to celebrate Krystal, the young woman’s, 25th birthday. A number of their friends had come out from Alice, which was only a half hour drive away.

At the campsite, we went through the food box and Rachael decided to leave most of its contents behind. The first three days had been quite demanding, our packs quite heavy, or so they seemed. We would gather strength as we went along, but this day was probably the most taxing of the whole trip. We were exhausted and not particularly hungry.

We did happily drink the fruit juice in the box, but didn’t eat the can of vegetable soup (put in for this food drop night and never intended to be carried along) because when the cafe closed a young woman gave us a bag of hot, packaged meat pies, rather than throw them out. For some reason free food seems an obligation that trumps all other choices, regardless of the quality issue. Though I would not have ordered or wanted or paid for a Mrs. Mac’s Beef Pie, when one was offered I succumbed without hesitation. I did actually enjoy it, initially, its warmth and beefy flavor, but not so much afterwards. Sort of like the Coke.

By dark all the day visitors to the chasm had gone off, and it was just Krystal and her husband Chris and us. We didn’t put up the tent, partly because I liked the idea of sleeping out, partly because I was too tired and lazy after our twenty-five kilometer day. The night was windy, and later the moon came up over the high ridge to the south, as annoyingly bright as the big lamps at an interstate rest area. I dozed on and off, but didn’t really sleep all that much.