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.