You can see a long way from Count's Point

The first several kilometers of the morning trail led steadily up to a high ridge. Not far from camp, I came upon Chris and Krystal, who had come up out the cold and shady gorge to have their "brekky" at a rocky outcropping in the sun. Soon after, I passed a group of dayhikers, led by a guide with dreads who carried a heavy pack containing their lunch. This group of ten or so, mostly women varying in age from late twenties to late sixties, was also walking the whole Larapinta, but they were being dropped off and picked up at the start and end of sections, and at night sleeping in hotels (at either a nearby resort or in Alice), a few times in campgrounds.

Rachael and I took a rest at the top of the ridge, and the dayhikers soon passed us. The top was a spare and jumbled field of rocks, and it had taken some looking to find stones flat and large enough to accommodate sitting. The Heavitree Range, like the Chewings, is topped with exposed quartzite, loose rocks and tilted, on-end slabs; but the rock was paler (though the dirt between and below was still red) and the vegetation more sparse--just a scattering of low spiky green grasses and the occasional mallee bush with most of its splayed branches burned and dead.

We continued along the ridge westwards, and I slowed my pace, stopped often to take in the far views (the path was too rocky for walking and gazing about at the same time). I felt giddy with the pleasure of the high trail, the bright sunshine, the sharp and handsome rocks beneath my feet, the dozens of miles of mountains before and behind me, the valleys far below on either side. A cool desert morning on a ridgetop inclines me towards an ecstatic love of the world....

We walked right to the end of the ridge, to Count's Point, where the dayhikers were having lunch, and where we did too. We made it a long lunch sitting on the rocks, and eating peanut butter sandwiches and individually wrapped slices of American cheese, and admiring the view. To the west, the ridges of the MacDonnell Range marched off in an impressively symmetrical manner, punctuated by three of the four highest peaks in the Northern Territory: Mt. Giles, Mt. Sonder, and Mt. Zeil, staggered in the distance. To the southwest we could see Gosse Bluff, a wide crater made 130 million years ago by a massive comet, whose shockwaves had shattered the rock strata for thousands of meters underground and altered the geology of the whole region. To the south rolling redlands stretched for hundreds of miles, down towards Uluru and Kings Canyon.

Chris and Krystal had come up with us, and just before we all descended the ridge Chris borrowed Rachael’s cellphone to call his mother in Sydney. When she answered we could all hear her screams of happy surprise, and Chris momentarily held the phone away from his ear.

When he got off, he said to Krystal, “good news, we have another month of bookings for the house.”

Krystal clapped her hands, then took a quick breath, indicating she had just made a discovery. “That means we can have another month before we go back to work.” Chris agreed, and they immediately began discussing the near future possibilities.

Chris had bought the house, which is somewhere on the coast south of Sydney, I can’t remember where, the year before, with his mother’s encouragement and financial help. He’d spent most of the past year, up until a couple months ago, restoring the house. Now he rented it out to vacationers, with his mother acting as agent. The more bookings, the less he and Krystal had to make to pay the mortgage. At some point in the vague future they thought they might settle down and live in the house themselves. At least his mother, who lived nearby, hoped so.

A steep descent, then a walk through hilly mulga forest brought us after another couple hours to the night's campsite, in among a stand of small trees just downhill from Serpentine Chalet Dam. The small dam was a strange and unusual artifact in that place, a gray wall of concrete plugging a modest gorge. It is long defunct, with only sand behind and almost right up to the lip. The dam had been put up in 1960 by two Italian carpenters (whose names are stenciled in the outer wall), to provide water for Serpentine Chalet two kilometers downhill and now abandoned and in ruins as well.

Chris and Krystal had arrived first, and Chris had collected wood and set it beside a small fire ring near their tent. When we arrived he pointed out his fire, implying it would do for us all. For the last couple nights they had shared Rachael's fire, and apparently he wanted to return the favor, or have control of the fire, or both. But Rachael wanted her own fire. "Do you think that would be rude?" she asked me. Not exactly rude, but it made me a little uncomfortable, and I suggested maybe we should defer to Chris this time. Rachael considered then went ahead and made a fire in the ring at our campsite, maybe twenty yards from Chris and Krystal's. We ended up cooking and eating dinner at our separate fires (both of them, by the way, technically illegal), but then Chris and Krystal gathered at Rachael's fire for the social part of the evening. It was the better fire of the two.

While we were setting up camp, a lone man arrived from the west, and he put up his rather large tent between our site and Chris and Krystal's. He cooked his dinner on a stove, sitting in the door of his tent.

After dark, Rachael invited him to our fireside. His name was Marcus, and he was from Germany. He had come limping into camp, and he moved slowly as he squatted down by the fire. A few days before he had started on the trail with a recently met companion, an American, and soon both were experiencing knee trouble. The other man had left the trail already, but Marcus was hoping to continue at least as far as Ellery Creek, two more days to the east. If his knees weren't any better then, he said, he'd hitchhike back to Alice.

But he was reluctant to give up, in part because of the money he'd already spent on food and transportation. Most people hiking the trail have paid three hundred dollars to be shuttled out to the western end, making their food drops along the way.

Marcus was in his early thirties, bearded and long-haired, diffident and soft-spoken as he answered questions from Rachael and Krystal. His English was good, but sometimes he didn't understand what was said to him, and he was often tentative in trying out words and phrases, though he usually had them right. For a long time when he first came to the fire he held a self-rolled cigarette in one hand, unlit; when he finally smoked it, he turned aside discreetly at each exhalation. He told us he had come to Australia seven weeks before and planned to stay a year; he had a work visa and would travel till his money ran low, then get a job. He'd mostly been in the north, in Darwin at first. "I sit on the beach," he said, "for two weeks, yes." He nodded but didn't smile. "It is good," he added.

He said that after the Larapinta he hoped to find someone who could give him a ride to Cairns, on the northeast coast. He had driven down to Alice with people he met farther north. I envied him greatly, his time mostly, the open days ahead of him, but his calm demeanor as well, and the sense I had that he was up for whatever came his way. I wondered what sort of life he had led in Germany, and why so many Germans are out about in the world, but we didn't get to those questions. Conversations with other travelers are usually partial, incomplete; often I'm left wanting to know more. But when the fire wood was all burned, we said good night and went off to our different tents.