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March 27, 2007
No water, no rubies...
Last Monday, I finally got the ute where I needed it - fully functional and ready for some 4WD tracks. It was a week late cause the leaf springs that I needed didn't get delivered the week prior. They arrived last week and were installed so Nat and I decided to head out to the Eastern MacDonnell ranges. Not quite as well known as the West Macs but just as beautiful and less tourists (always a bonus).
We left in the early afternoon and made our first stop at Trephina Gorge. It's a lovely place that would have been a great place for camping had there been a little more water flowing in the river/creek. We hiked for a bit looking for a suitable waterhole but found nothing deep enough for a decent swim. The only thing I discovered was that the majority of the water was flowing under the sand in the riverbed - hence I'm standing in the picture with one foot on top of the sand and the other down on the river bed.
After Trephina, we headed to Arltunga, an old ghost town that once supported a brief gold rush in the late 19th to early 20th century. It now stands abandoned except for a visitors center/ranger station and a pub. How the pub pays it's bills I do not know. It's fairly far off the beaten track and is only open from Mar - Dec, Thurs - Monday, 12-9pm. That said, we would have been customers had we not completely been trapped in the 21st century with only cards and no cash on hand.
The night was then spent back 40km at the Ross River Resort, who did accept modern forms of payment. It's a nice turn of the century homestead that has been refurbished to its original form. I believe that it played a part in the filming of Quigley Down Under..
The next day we headed again to Arltunga and checked out the visitors center. Not much different from other gold rush towns other than this one wasn't as plentiful and the hardships were even harder. I also found evidence of Canadian industry with an old Ford motor
From Arltunga we headed out a 4WD track to Ruby Gap. After a while, the graded dirt road ended at an old station and a sign to the left directed us down a much more rugged track. This last 20km in to Ruby Gap was slow going. The path was rarely more than two tyre tracks crossing various washouts and often followed dried up creek beds for hundreds of meters. After an hour of toiling we made it to the dried up bed of the Hale River - not anything like the posters describing its previous flooding. 
We headed up the riverbed in search of some waterholes that the ranger had described. No such luck. All that was to be seen was lots of rock, sandy riverbed and some knee deep water inhabited by a few leeches and tadpoles. Even though the river had flooded last month, there was little evidence other than the debris that the water had scattered everywhere.
The trip home was alright. I was satisfied in knowing that the ute handled alright under relatively hardy conditions (nothing stressful but quite bumpy) but wasn't quite happy with the lack of water. That's the one column where the Western Macs seems superior - nearly yearlong waterholes.
Next big trek - hopefully heading to Boggy Hole via the Giles track or Giles via Boggy.
Posted by Dr.Unk at March 27, 2007 1:41 AM
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