Hi All,
Arrived
home last night from a trip out to the Warrakurna community, my Daughter is working out there as a teacher so I took the opportunity to go and visit and bring her back
home for the holidays.
left
Perth last Wednesday afternoon unsure of the chances of getting through as the road was closed, but managed to get through ok, couple of bad spots but no major issues.
Had an unreal time at the community, spent some time with the Kids in school and Dave and Margaret from the
Giles weather station showed me around the area.
There are some amazing
places in the Rawlinson ranges, in particular Gills
Pinnacle, which is about 60k towards Docker river from the Warrakurna roadhouse, a series of water falls and pools descend from the ranges at this place,
well worth sacrificing a new tyre driving up the creek to get there. (wet rocks love tyres)
The return trip to
Perth was rather eventful as
well, the GCR was still closed between
Warburton and Tjiukayirla although when i came up they were letting people through but apparently the shire had tried to lay some culverts across the road and this made things worse and the road was impassable.
We decided to take a detour around the road works, this involved heading up the Tjirrkarii/
Wiluna road, then cutting back on the Kanpa road, this hit the GCR just below the doomed roadwork's.
We left Warrakurna at 3:30pm Tuesday after school finished, stopped at
Warburton for some fuel, should have listened to advice at
Warburton that our planned route was not to flash but we had other advice that it was ok, anyway about 40k up the Tjirrkarii road we hit a large stretch of water across the road, one abandoned ute bogged in the middle with numerous sticks poking up presumably identifying obstacles, the entry was not to bad but the exit was nasty and to far away from the entry to attempt a recovery by the second vehicle even with all our recovery gear joined.
It was just getting dark but we had noticed a fresh track off to the left that skirted the
boggy hole, it appeared to head into the scrub about a 100m then ran parralel with the road and rejoined the road about 200m down, it was a fresh track and had been used by a couple of vehicles, so going against my better judgement (I do know you should always stay on the road and go through the centre of the water) we took the bypass.
I went first and got through ok, although it was a bit soft and my Nissan being auto probably saved me as I had plenty of speed at first and was able to drop back to low to continue when it started to bog down, my companion was not so lucky, he went down to the diffs with about a 100m of soft stuff between him and my me, oh dear.
It was now dark, we spent a hour trying to dig the bogged Nissan out with no luck, I had a Bull air bag jack, it was not easy to get this to work as it continualy slipped out in the mud, but eventualy we did get it to lift it up but then it slipped on the chassis rail in met a sad end agains a body support bracket,still we had managed to get a few peices of wood under the rear wheel and had dug the front free, with some severe pushing we got it to drive about 2 x feet before it sunk again back onto both diffs.
Fed up by now and again against my better judgement I decided to bring my Nissan back accross the damp ground to get behind the bogged Nissan and snatch him out, as you would have guessed that did not work, with both Nissans now down on both Diffs in the Mud, it was about 9:30 at night and we were along way from any assistance, many lessons learn't here.
It took another 2hrs, a lot of digging by hand, jacking using trees and spare wheels as jacking plates, near flat tyres but we eventualy retrieved both cars, the "swamp was a 100 meters or so wide and even when we managed to get them up we would drive 10m and they would go down again, but persistance saw us on the right side of the swamp to continue.
We had another 100 odd k's to go before we hit the GCR, this included quite a few more long water crossings in the dark as
well as a couple of decision on which was the correct track, one water crossing was paticularly nasty with some deep holes, speed and hanging on tight was the only way through, eventualy we hit the GCR and made our way to Tjiukayirla roadhouse arriving at 2:00am Wednesday morning (yesterday).
I learnt a few lessons on this ordeal, I have done quite a few remote trips and are normaly much better prepared, this trip was never intended as an offroad adventure, and I was not carring any camping gear or supplies apart from water of coarse and some drinks in the Engel, I had thrown in some recovery gear as I new there was a chance of some difficulty on the GCR, but I don't consider the GCR remote so I did not carry to much else, next time I won't venture into the remote wilderness without enough supplies for when things go wrong.