I got up before light this morning. I started walking with my head torch. Which can be a bit tricky when the path is the creek. They have poles with orange glow on them that I was able to pick up but the path other walkers take was harder to see and that meant I went the wrong way a couple of times. It was only half hour but no damage done at that stage.
The creek whilst closing in in some areas was pleasant enough to walk along. Then you pop out onto a station property with the increase in sheep and flies. A couple of station tracks to walk and I was at the Eyre Depot Campsite. Campsites can be a bit of a misnomer as there are no formed tent sites and at each one there are normally only 1 or 2 spots a tent can go on level ground. This site was exposed with no trees on a rocky paddock. There was 2 sites that campers like me had cleared of rocks on level ground. But for me it was onwards. Now it was trek across open paddocks.
Paddocks of rocks that is. Lucky there is not much to look at as you spend your time looking at your feet. The one time I looked up was the first tumble I had taken on the trip. Walking across these rocky paddocks wears the legs out with a slide here a stumble there and no value in a lot of the energy you expend walking across them. So I think it was about another 7km of following fence lines then I started climbing the tracks into the hills to the northern boundary of the Dutchman Stern conservation park.
All the elevation you gain coming out of the paddocks is lost as you go all the way back down to the boundary where you start following a creek. Looking down the creek I am sure it would lead out and around the hills I just climbed to get here. Now this creek was a tiring business as you are climbing at a fair rate on a creek bed. The walls you have to go around get taller and taller. I did stop to look at an eagle and some falcons having a blue in the air and made a video of the cliffs where I think they were nesting then back down the creek again boulder hopping.
Twenty minutes later the creek runs under a looming cliff and after looking at it for a while I realised it was the same cliff - 20 minutes doing a u-turn around a hill. The trials in this creek went on for hour after hour with some of the by-passes of cliffs as dangerous as climbing the cliff. I finally got out of that creek and I was losing the sun. It may stay light for a while but once I am in shadow the the temperature drops quickly. I found the first reasonable spot to set-up the tent and stopped for the night. It was on a bit of a slope so I knew I was going to slide down the tent a bit but in the end I slept 10 hours.
Today was a chore. A few more of them to come.
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