26 Hours
Imagine you have spent 6 days bumping over the roughest, mostly trackless terrain averaging maybe 8 kmh.
Its almost over as you approach station land expecting easy tracks ahead but then you come over a crest and there it is - a lake as far as the eye could see blocking your path.
Well that is how it was on our recent
Madigan line crossing.
But this note is not about our trip but rather I'm asking you to seriously consider just how do you go about working thru such a problem with the limited information at hand.
In all the years we have been driving we have never quite been put in this scenario and some mistakes were made.
First, full realization of the problem doesn't come at once.
Our 5 vehicles have been given permission to enter Madigans
camp 20 from the west.
I guess we assumed that like the Eyre creek bypass, that if you had permission you could obviously get across - wrong, assumptions out there are mistakes just waiting to bite you.
In the closing stages of the this trip we were happily plodding along, beginning to think of
home and a meal at the
Birdsville pub with no idea that the toughest stretch was before us.
7km from
camp 20 we came across this enormous lake. No one believed it, 6 days driving into a total dead end.
We probed the edges and it was a serious vehicle trap, so we began to think, the maps were of little use but we figured the lake could be 20km long and it was 4pm. Some wanted to stop and some didn't.
Howard (ACT) and myself concluded that we had to get more data so to make a better decisions.
We 2 headed off with the intention of driving up to 40km cross country around the lake to see if we could still get to the crossing near
camp 20.
In the 3 hours of remaining light we managed to force our way to the southern tip of the lake after some hairy adventures across mud flats and a near vertical dune.
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On dusk we made
camp for the night and before sunrise we were on our way heading north up the other side of the lake, by 10am we had our answer, the entire area was hopelessly flooded.
We slopped our way close to the edge of Eyre creek at the crossing co-ordinates and had to leave the cars for the remaining 50 meters.
It was like a tropical jungle and in front of us lay an almost complete wall of
spider webs with huge fat spiders that would have made quite a meal for TV hero Bear Gyliss.
We had to retreat and get long sticks to clear a path to the creek edge and when we did our hearts sank.
The Eyre was huge and flowing fast - all hope of crossing it was gone.
So here we are an impossible 300m from the appointed place.
It really does make you sit down and analyse you options.
Our North Simpnson strip map booklet, which had proved so useful was now no help at all.
The good part was that we had food water and fuel for a week, satphone and HF comms.
But what do you do!
No real chance of backtracking - apart from being a long long way the dunes
were hard enough coming the easy way, and even if possible it might take a week and leave us stranded if it was to hard.
There is an official Eyre crossing about 65 km line of sight cross country from our position however our reconnaissance indicated that it would probably be blocked by other lakes.
In every other trip I can remember there was a destination - it may be hard - you may have to winch it, but their was a known ending.
Here you could not be sure of anything and just had to theorize, take your best guess and hope.
We figured we only had one real option - to head vaguely in the direction of the Eyre creek bypass bearing right at every water body that blocked our way and then looping back left once across to try and preserve a heading.
Ultimately we figured we would have to hit the QAA line somewhere before running out of fuel.
Howards rally experience and ability to read the land made him the more suitable leader and his 79 series V8 had a bullbar to boot, whereas my 4800 Patrol was the faster more nimble car with more traction aids and
I had a passenger(my wife Anne) and hence a second pair of eyes.
We informed the other cars of the situation and our plan over UHF and headed off.
And so began a drive I will never forget, we set up a search pattern constantly probing left against the water bodies followed by a dashes up to the dunes to assess the situations, trees ahead meant water and danger.
We moved fast but carefully, no point risking the cars, if they broke down, they'd stay there a long time.
But there was a serious amount of country to explore and it needed to be done efficiently, it was not a time for a convoy plod with each using up their fuel.
Every type of surface was before us, from mudflats with holes on a 1 meter
grid pattern that mercilessly pounded the cars to tackling untracked dunes up the steep side.
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Thick scrub needed the bullbar, and water eroded dunes had big holes in them and were made invisible by spinnfex cover.
Howard was setup with Ozi-explorer and rudimentary maps and I used a Garmin 276c in dead reckoning mode.
It would be a long drive with no stopping at all today !
After a while you get into a rhythm and anticipate each others moves - if one went into some dead end scrub the other would weave around looking for another path, but it was treacherous work.
Howard stopped to verify a heading and in 5 seconds began to sink - a quick snatch and 2 minutes to recover him, which included refilling the coffee mugs from the thermos.
I learnt that cattle take the path of least resistance and Howard often followed short single trails until they went under a branch - next minute we were on an old but man made green covered trail. Could this be an unknown station track, heading for the crossing.
500 meters later our answer, as it turned right and dead ended at what was probably once a station
waterhole.
Off again, south now following a rough dune, but dunes run out, and where they do, there is often a huge body of water in front.
The classic Simpson floodway Wedgee, nothing to do but turn around and look for a crossing across the mudflats.
On and on we went non-stop for hours and the terrain pushed us away from our target.
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10km out our course need significant correction, we had to bee line across some heavy dunes, maybe the roughest we had encountered.
On the peak of the dune now, and we expected to see the next lake to block us when Howard said "I see the crossing, clear land ahead" and with great relief we arrived at the
Eyre creek crossing , beaten up but happy.
I began replacing some ripped out breather hoses before doing the crossing and we looked up a saw a person.
The first we had seen for 7 days - it was no other than Stephen L (see his post 88373)
On we pressed, 1 minute for Big Red which never looked so easy, another for
little Red , down the bypasses and into
Birdsville 26 hours and 2 minutes after we began.
We had traveling the entire length of the west bank of Eyre Creek north of Ruwolts
bore, over 100 km of the purest cross country driving I have even done dodging mud swamps dunes & lakes and heavy
undergrowth.
For us this has been exploring Australia in the rawest sense, we may never do a drive like this again - but there is little need as this one will be remembered a long time.
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