West Macs

With having made Alice Springs a day early we have a little more time up our sleeve for the real stuff. We chose not to do the Alice Springs Desert Discovery Centre for the princely sum of $68 and decided instead to opt for the real experience. After introducing ourselves to the watercolour style of the Hermannsburg school galleried in the entry centre there, we headed west into the West MacDonnell Ranges with the added bonus of the sun at our backs.

First stop was Simpsons Gap. The major message here was the difficulty in taking photos to do justice to the landscapes. The vast scale and the high contrast between sun and shade serves to demonstrate just what a good job the eye does in adapting to the range of conditions.

These ranges were formed when the sedimentary layers deposited in a shallow inland sea the size of the Mediterranean were lifted and folded so that in places the layers are now vertical.  Some layers are harder than others and so resist erosion more than the rest, forming the ridges of the ranges. In places the hard layers crack, leaving a gap and many of the features of interest in this area are the creeks in those gaps.

After driving and walking into Simpson’s Gap, Standley Chasm, Serpentine Creek and Big Hole we decided we’d had enough of traipsing through sand, we did a brief journey into the ochre pits. Here, the folding of the layers had created a painters buffet with all of the coloured layers lying vertically next to each other just waiting to be dug up. Alas, not for visitors though. Souveniring is strictly forbidden.

From then, much to Elliot’s disappointment, it was in to Ormiston Gorge for our camp. He was hoping for the resort just a little further on. So we had a camp setup with two grumpy boys but fortunately they took themselves off up the hill to leave the cooks in peace.

Isabel managed to solve the conundrum of the mismatched plain flour and self-raising flour canisters and lids with her super-sensitive taste buds and so our dinner of roast pork and veal, followed by apple and syrup steamed pudding with custard was a great success and demolished in record time. Fortunately, the fading light under clear skies held on long enough but the rapid fall in temperature was ominous.