Saturday, October 3, 2015

We began the day innocently enough with a walk called Mini Palms. The path led through yellow-lime spiky spinifex mounds contrasted with the stunning grey blue of the dying spears. Absolutely striking. Maybe new ideas here for painting our new house!

Then, as on other walks, the path followed a dry pebbly riverbed which slows walking considerably. As the gorge narrowed we were clambering over huge conglomerate boulders to see palms and another gorge. Did the boulders fall 10,000 years ago, or 50,000? The geological time frame is so far removed from our experience that it hardly makes any difference. At one rock formation two different posters referred to it as 360 million years old, and another as 340 million years old. What’s 20 million years in geological time!

On the horrendously corrugated road out of the park we forded several streams. At one I was hopping out of the camper to walk around the pool to snap a picture of Geoff driving through the water. Just as I was about to walk away from the camper I saw a bull with very large, long horns not 10 feet away resting in the shade. But there was a cow on the other side of the vehicle and there was no way I was going to get between a bull and his cow just for the sake of a picture.

Tonight we are in a caravan park where we ran into 4 men from Melbourne with whom we’d chatted on the Dome walk two days ago. They had done the iconic Canning Stock Route several years ago, a 1,600 km cattle drover’s track that hasn’t seen a grader since the first cattle travelled it in the 1930’s. I’m up for adventure, but I think I’d classify my travelling as “soft adventure.”

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