Having joined forces with my folks in their four wheel drive in Alice Springs, we took the old Ghan Railway route, well away from the modern highway, heading towards Finke. There’s actually two tracks that run parallel – the main highway:
And the Finke Desert Race track, the home of one of Australia’s premier off-road events.
After a brief stint on the boring, fairly well graded highway, I decided to warm myself up for the knarly soft sand riding I’d be facing, by using the race track for a stretch.
The luggage strapped to the back wasn’t too happy with bouncing around, so it went into the truck, and I carried on for a while longer. I managed not to lose it, but I did get bogged on one very soft hill with some moguls on the slope up – lost balance and then lost my momentum straightening her up.
This was very tiring though, so after I’d had my fun I jumped back on the main road, heading for Maryvale Station.
After lunch, we headed for Chamber’s Pillar, a 100 km round trip detour off the main road to Finke. This road got considerably worse, with lots of washouts, loose rocks, and soft sandy sections.
Once near the Pillar, there are a number of these sandstone structures that jut out into the desert sky, creating spectacular shapes.
Then there’s Chamber’s Pillar itself, famous as a place where the early explorers would mark their passage by carving their names into the distinctive landmark.
There was a nice view over the desert from its raised base.
With sunset approaching, I settled in on the west side to see the landscape light up.
There was a handy campsite only 500 metres away, so that was our stop for the night.
The next morning we pushed back up the road to the old Ghan Route, and then headed south towards Finke, stopping at a number of abandoned railway sidings.
The route doesn’t just follow the original railway, but actually uses a lot of the same causeways and cuttings that the trains did. There are still bits of sleeper and iron bolts from the old track scattered everywhere across the road.
The first clouds I’ve seen in what feels like weeks!
Pushing on past Finke, we approached our eventual aim of Mt Dare, the last roadhouse and fuel stop before hitting the Simpson Desert. There’s all sorts of odd hazards on outback roads.
Passing by the ruins of the Charlotte Waters homestead, it’s apparent how tough life is this far away from any permanent water source.
Although the Simpson desert straddles three states (NT, QLD and SA), most of the routes across are almost entirely in South Australia: so, another border crossing.
After so many dusty dry roads on the way in, it was surprising to find that the last two kilometres in to Mt Dare were still extremely wet and muddy – we later found out that they were running very short on diesel as the truck couldn’t get through.
Sadly, I picked the wrong path to try through the mud and had to be pulled back out.
But we got there in the end, refueled, stocked up on supplies, and had one last steak and beer before hitting the desert proper.
