We packed up camp, with one last look at the view from Jimmy's Thunderbox. Gotta love a loo with a view
The objective today was to get to Hanging Rock, we approached this with some trepidation as this is on a seldom used track right through the Mulga and Spinifex country.
Our first stop was at this Pool, simply called No.11 Pool. It's a great little spot about 8km or so West of the main track. This would have made a better camp site than DQB in my opinion. We filled up a 10 litre water container for some shower water later and carried on.
After another few km's we came to another awesome pool, even better than the last one. Both would be very worthy camping spots. Don't ask me to pronounce the name of this one, but it's called Tjingkulatjatjarra Pool.
The next few shots are screen grabs from the Gopro, please excuse the quality.
There was a plaque embedded into a tree with a little bit of history inscribed: The inscription relates the story of some prospectors following in their old relations footsteps who had prospected the area in 1937/38 and 39 using camels.
We headed off to another waterhole along the way, called Watrara pool, but there were a few campers at this one who weren't the most sociable bunch. I'm not sure what the story was, but they were all traveling together but camped well apart, maybe they had a grumpy old mans fight or something? Anyway they weren't keen on talking to us so we left the grumpy old farts to it. Looked like a bloody nice place apart from the people.
From here we had some difficulty in finding the track West, so we back tracked a little and I noticed a small rock cairn trackside. This marked the track we were looking for, so off we went. It was probably around the 2:00pm mark by this time and the track was a pretty hard slog in sections. Heaps of Spinifex and Mulga and we lost the track numerous times. I was a bit concerned at the fact that we hadn't put some sort of radiator blind on, given the height of the spinifex. But we were committed now, so we pushed on.
After a couple of hours of pushing through shit, we came to a reasonable sized clearing near Curran Curran Rockhole. We at last had a chance to get out and survey the spinifex situation under the Patrol, the crap was everywhere and trust me, you don't want to bury your head in the sand and ignore this stuff. (We were told later of at least one vehicle destroyed this year not far away on the CSR due to a spinifex fire underneath it) I helped my partner Bren, clear the underneath and I then had a look at the radiator. It wasn't pretty, so I cleared what I could and made up a bonnet blind out of some shade cloth we carry for ground sheets. I closed it in under the bonnet and zippy tied it to the recovery points and whatever else I could find below. (Man I love zippy ties)
After taking a while to clear the spinifex, we decided it was getting on and we had no hope in hell of reaching Hanging Rock today as it was still around 40km of this crap to traverse through and it had taken us over 2 hours to do around 20km's. I was also concerned at our fuel use as we were chewing through it much faster than anticipated. We were thinking of surrendering and turning around the next morning in defeat.
I was doing a bit of filming and noticed what I thought was a Dingo just disappearing behind the spinifex. No problems I thought, so we set up camp and got ourselves fed and watered and had an early night. At about 12:30am we heard growling and barking about 10-15 metres away from our tent, now I've never heard a dingo react like this so can only assume it was a wild dog/cross dingo. This thing meant business and my first thought was to listen to see if it was in a pack, luckily it was alone.
I yelled out at it in a pretty aggressive voice, but this only succeeded in making this thing worse! Shit! I thought, we had no weapons, the missus was with me and we were in a thin tent. I've never felt threatened in all my times camping all over Oz until this moment. This thing sounded like it was going to have a go at us through the tent. I ended up clicking the Patrols remote control and flashing the indicators, this was enough to scare it off for now. The bloody thing came back twice in the night at around 2:30am and 4:30am, and it was extremely aggressive every time. Needless to say we didn't leave the tent that night for a leak and it was one of the only times I wish I had a gun with us for protection. It rattled both of our nerves and we hardly slept that night!
So up and outta there once the sun rose, we saw no further signs of the dog, but I am sure it was watching us. We had decided to push on and achieve our objective of Hanging Rock, we were well prepared and we had a Plan B regarding fuel, where we would divert to Parngurr community and top up the tanks the next day.
We had much of the same country to plough through and the odd dry river crossing to cross. It was probably slightly better than the previous days driving, but we still had to search back and forth for the track at times.
Finally at around 11:00am, Hanging Rock came into view.
Well, what can I say, it was a long drive to see a rock! but I was totally satisfied we had made it. Not many people come out to this place and the modern day list who have seen it first hand wouldn't be too long. I'll finish off the trip report in the next installment as I need to get some work done now.
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