Murray Sunset National Park - Bogged to the gunnels & a classic outback recovery

Sunday 28th September
Mildura

It was a bit of a lie in and then awoke to another sunny day. The invigorating dip in the river got the blood moving and then it was breakfast and a camp pack-up. A group of canoeists pulling onto the sandbar for a breather just upstream of us. We were on the road by 10:00 a.m. and wound our way back past Jinkers Bend to the River Road. We headed down south along the River Track to the Chalka Creek Track and back inland to the Stockyard Track. There were plenty of lizards on the move and the amount of wildlife about was stunning. Bush chooks (aka Running Ducks), stumpy’s (by the dozen), roo’s and unfortunately, the ubiquitous bunny appears to be regaining a foothold. It’s the first time in a decade that I’ve seen them in such numbers, not as great as years gone by but they are there and all too plainly visible.

He hit the bitumen on the Wemen Road and headed back to Hattah where we grabbed a bit of mid morning sustenance and deposited the recyclables before heading across the rail line and west on the dirt towards Glencoe Station and the Murray-Sunset National Park. We headed off the main road onto the Last Hope Track passing a variety of landscapes including salt lakes, samphire and copi plains, Native pine and Buloke woodlands and mallee sand dunes. The wildflowers were in abundance. Pigface, porchalaca, poached egg daisy, onion weed and native stock were blooming in abundance. The purple of the pig face provided a surreal garden like vista in many areas, particularly around the salt and clay pans.

There was no stock evident on Glencoe and the place looks rundown. I must see if it’s still operating as a station or whether the National Parks have picked it up for addition to their mallee holdings. Regardless, the country looked good. The birdlife was amazing with large flocks of Galahs, Corellas, Major Mitchells and Sulphur Crested cockies grazing. The bird on watch in the nearby tree would screech as we approached and a cloud of birds would fly into the air only to circle and land again to continue their cropping.

Got an impressive vista of the surrounding countryside from One Tank Hill and then stopped at one of the small pristine salt lakes and its long abandoned water trough. At the junction on the edge of the Raak Plains, we continued east on Pheeny’s rather than the Last Hope. This track skirts the edge of the Raak plain. In a lesson of what can occur in just a moments inattention, the track on the left hand side gave way pulling us off to the left into the boggy clay. I managed to correct it but in doing so, it flicked us to the right and just a few centimeters off the track and that was it, I managed to get the car straight but we were heading for china. While the track is relatively hard and stable, underneath the surface on either side, the crust breaks easily and you fall into a bog of loose sandy composite. This goo certainly arrests your forward momentum but any medium would when your bull bar has become a snow plow! We were in the bleep e and in it deep! Luckily the passengers side wheels had stayed on the track but we were in a hell of a lean to the right. So much so that I couldn’t get my door open, the mud pushing against it hard. I slipped it into low but that only drove us deeper so It was a shut down and time for thought.

The solution came from a combination of measures and the patience to get all factors aligned. Firstly, we removed the spare and dug a deep ‘T’ shaped trench some 15 metres in front of the vehicle. We wrapped the winch cable through the center of the spare and around the tyre making sure that when it was placed in the hole, the cable was looped around the bottom of the tyre. The cable trench was also excavated to nearly the same depth so the cable would not pull the tyre up and out of the trench. These have to be deep of you’ll soon pull the wall out of the trench. Then we set about clearing the driver’s side of the vehicle from mud. It took a while to clear the wheels but when we finally had them exposed to the light, I deflated the tyres down to 15 psi all round. Finally, I trekked back to a copi island about 600 metres away and gathered what timber and scrub I could find. This was then placed in the newly excavated trench. We rammed the heavy, branch ends as far under the tyres as we could reckoning that with the mush underneath, we needed the thickest timbers to form the support.

After that it was low range, a prayer and with me operating the remote and driving, Hugh walked the drivers side pushing the plant material down under the tyres with the shovel. Slowly the vehicle eased itself out and onto the track. It had taken a fraction over 4 hours of work but we were out. My back was rooted. From there we retreated to a place of shade in the base of the sandhills and blew the tyres back up before heading on to Mildura. A hard days work that we shouldn’t have needed to do but lessons learned. The winch has finally been used in anger and another outback remedy for extraction tried and found to work. Despite being stuffed we felt pretty good about things. Love that remote control for the winch. A real boon.

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