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.