Serpentine Gorge – Ellery Creek
Up at 6 am, per usual. It took the best part of an hour to get dressed and pack up the tent, and then another half an hour to eat breakfast (cereal, hot chocolate, chocolate).
Then we started walking. Today was an undulating walk. There were no big climbs, but there were plenty of sharp ups and downs. The country was beautiful, but not as remarkable as on the previous days.
It was a relatively short walk, less than 15 km. We reached our campsite at 11:30 am. On the way we passed a trig point (which had a helpful sign, just in case you didn’t know it was a trig point) and a stile over a fence in the middle of nowhere.
On the way, Steven and I made a diversion from the Larapinta track on the “Dolomite Walk“. This goes past a feature called Snake Rock, which looks more like a crocodile or the Loch Ness monster.
There was phone reception at the Ellery Creek campsite. I caught up on my messages and emails and gave Trish a call which was very nice. I also checked the weather forecast.
We then had lunch in a picnic shelter and, after lunch, collected our food drop and sorted out our items.
Afterwards, we discussed the plan for the next week. The weather forecast isn’t good. There are days of substantial rain. It’s possible of that the rain could result in parts of the track being closed. In the end it was decided to do a “double“ day of walking tomorrow. It will be a total of 31 km, but is relatively level. We plan to make it to Hugh Gorge.
Dave and I then pitched our tents in the creek bed. I wrote up my blog and then went for a walk to the Ellery Creek waterhole.
We had dinner by the waterhole. I had lamb tikka masala, which wasn’t too bad. I also picked up some banana and chocolate dehydrated concoction from the “free stuff” at the food drop. That was also pretty good.
We could hear the dingoes howling as we ate our dinner. Sue had brought another of the Sydney Morning Herald quizzes for us all to do. It was one that I had already done with the family, but I’d forgotten most of the correct answers.
During dinner, a dingo came by. It was quite unafraid of us. At one point it was within 15 m of our group. We were a bit worried about our tents and whether any dingoes would go there, but when we returned to the tents after dinner they were all okay.
I fell asleep listening to the dingoes.
