Into the unknown - The Gibson Desert & Mount Madley W.A.

Wednesday 2nd July, 2008
Mount Madley WA
24 30 30.38 S, 123 57 24.09 E

A fantastic day of remote outback travel. A whopping total of 60 kilometres of rugged outback country traversed over 9 hours of travel. This evening I sat contentedly at the summit of Mount Madley and watched the sun set, a warm breeze blowing at me back and I remembered why Iove coming to these places so much. The sheer isolation and remoteness, the pristine, arid environment, the perfect clearness of the evening sky, the silence. It’s all captivating. If my time had come then and there I’d have gone a very contented soul. It was with great reluctance that I retraced my steps to camp in the gathering darkness lest I break a leg on the return journey down hill.

The day began at dawn with breakfast and a pack of camp. I used loctite on the rear left hand spring hanger nuts which are constantly working themselves loose. We were on the road at 8:40 a.m. none the worse for wear for having celebrated Canada day in fine form the previous evening. The cleared line continues to provide all varieties of surface conditions from overgrown acacia, ant mounds, some track, no track, wash-aways and rock. A few quick decisions in regards to right or left were called for and even then, some were wrong forcing a reverse and the inevitable "take two". Great country though with occasional rocky rises, spinifex plains and then copses of acacia and shrubs that were intent on removing both the paint and mirrors from the car.







After a couple of hours of solid travelling we covered the 23 odd kilometres to the intersection of the track to Walgoobaloo Rockhole. The turn was quite discernable at the intersection but it became less so as it wound its way through the spinifex and scrub to the north. The 12 km took us over an hour. We reached the top of a rocky rise and then followed an old set of wheel tracks down into a valley. The moving map program indicated we were on course for the rockhole but the track ended. The problem with the ‘big number’ Hema maps is the margin for error in the co-ordinates and the actual feature depicted on the map. For example, a simple blue dot indicating a waterhole could encompass an area hundreds of metres across. The track north petered out into nothing so we turned around and tried a different track along the top of the ridge but soon realised that this was taking us in the direction of Mount Madley. On back-tracking, the fates caught up with Scott and he slashed the front passengers side tire which deflated instantly. 3 to 1 the score is now. The sun was beating down on us as we changed the tyre so we moved on to find some shade once the new tyre was in place. Gaby provided lunch which we scoffed in the shade provided by the side of the troopy.

We decided to walk the 800 metres in search of the rockhole but after scouring the bush and shrubbery for the best part of an hour, decided to return to the vehicles and call it a bad idea. The rockhole could have been anywhere or non existent, the actual co-ordinates being “approximate” only. After this we headed back on the top track. Some vehicles appeared to have been through this way within the past few months and there was a track apparent heading in the general direction of Madley. It wound its way across the rocky rises and gullies before making it’s way down onto the soft sand and spinifex charting a course nor-nor-east. The track eventually split two large dunes and then headed back towards Madley on a nor-westerly bearing. The country was soft sand and spinifex with the dead mulga stakes one had to be constantly be on watch for.

We worked the dunes back in towards Madley and the Babul Rockhole. Again a fruitless period of time was spent searching a dry creek bed for the “approximate” position of the rockhole all to no avail. The creek bed was a shallow affair in the lee of a dune, an odd place for a rockhole. The thick scrub and spinifex made it near impossible to find anything that remotely resembling a water hole. There were no obvious signs of wildlife or birdlife around either. The ubiquitous zebra finches, always the herald of nearby water, were noticeably absent. Continuing on we reached Mount Madley at 3.15 p.m. Madley is the largest in a series of low rocky knolls, the highest containing a couple of cairns and a marker posted by some traveling souls back in 1985. We climbed the hill and placed a note in a jar inside one of the existing cairns. A geo-cache perhaps. The post and cairn make it easy to locate though!

It was near 4:00 pm by the time we returned to the vehicles so we only proceeded on another kilometer, finding a campsite in the lee of the northern slope of the Mount. There was plenty of dead wood about for the camp fire. Scott immediately went about repairing his tyre while I set up my camp and prepared dinner (Snags and foil roasted Vegies). We were all knackered, the constant twisting and turning and intense nature of the track having taken its toll.




I had a quick bucket bath after dinner and write the journal from the roof top taj (tent). A fairly mild night with a million stars shining. Tomorrow, we’re off into the Little Sandy in search of Dabbya Gorge.

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