McDonnell Ranges

Morning view from campsite

Conor at the morning fire

Ormiston Gorge

Ochre Pits

Our view from Howard's Point lookout campsite

It was cold enough for porridge this morning by Finke River, something to warm your hands around, and we even lit the fire again in the morning which Conor loves. We stopped by Ormiston Gorge hoping to do their bigger walk around the Pound but unfortunately due to flooding (I think a while ago) we would have had to swim through the last bit. In warmer weather and in cleaner water I would definitely have considered, but it’s getting a bit festy down there now, with the remains of lots of dead fish around the edge of the water (it’s obviously been evaporating over the last few months), and apart from that it’s freezing. Our other option was the Ghost Gums walk up one side of the gorge and back, which was also beautiful. Apparently at this gorge the top layer is quartzite, and the whole layer actually used to be a couple of kilometres away but was pushed south by underground forces millions of years ago. You can sort of see in the lines of the cliffs how this might have happened, although it’s hard to imagine.

After our walk, next stop was the nearby Ochre Pits for lunch. These pits have small cliffs of different coloured ochre which the indigenous people used (and I think sometimes still do use) for both every day and ceremonial use. It was really amazing to see the variety of colours in the cliffs, I never knew where ochre came from, or that the different colours were due to different amounts of iron in the earth (which rusts when exposed to air). The white ochre hardly has any in it, as opposed to the red ochre which has lots, and then there’s the yellow and orange in between. It looked really cool anyway, and I think has to be ground up, water added and then it could be used to paint people and on rocks etc.

We decided to make an early stop in the afternoon at another bush camp at Howard’s Point Lookout nearby, which meant that we could set up and then just hang out, which we’ve been really missing. Although we stayed for a quite a few nights at Uluru, we were so busy there all the time and have done lots of packing up every morning and arriving late at night (straight into journals, dinner etc), that we haven’t had much just hanging around/playing time. We even managed to fit in a board game and have dinner in the daylight, before watching the sun go down over the mountains which was just beautiful – followed soon after by a big full orange moon coming up over the other side.

Tomorrow it’s into Alice Springs for restocking and other errands, before heading north. Warm weather here we come again!