Day 41 – Palm Valley to Redbank Gorge

I get up at 6, just before the sunrise, which is pretty spectacular. The valley is absolutely beautiful. So quiet and peaceful.

We get ready for the 4km full “high clearance 4×4 only” road to the start of the walk. The drive is pretty fun for me, while requiring a fair bit of concentration and planning the right path through the rocks. There are some steep dry river entry and exits, but we make it and I don’t think we bottomed out at all, and given some of the scrapes on the rocks, it’s apparent others have.

As we arrive at the car park we get a nice close look at a kangaroo taking a morning drink from one of the waterholes on the otherwise dry riverbed. We get walking at about 8:30 but it’s already pretty warm.

There are two walks, a 1 hr and a 2 hr. Both start out as the same track. We hope for the 2h, but after a while we realise even at 8:30 we’ve left our run too late. So when we get the option of the longer walk we take the safe route and take the shorter course.

The valley is something else. I can say it was worth the drive in and the extra day. Seeing these palms in this setting is unworldly. This time we do have the place to ourselves, there are no other people here this morning. The cliff walls are a deep red, almost crimson. After the 1st half hour the walk climbs out of the valley and the return leg follows the top of the ridge. We know from now on that we’ll need to try and start each walk as close to sunrise as possible.

The X-Trail the French Lady is driving did not have enough clearance to make the 4km journey from the campground to the start of the palm valley walk.   Given there are 5 of us, we didn’t have any spare room in the MUX.  She said she was happy to walk in.  After our walk, we’re about halfway back from the car park to the campground and we come across her walking in, at 9:30am it hot as hell out here.  She has an umbrella and is carrying 3 ltr of water, but still!.   We offer to squeeze her in and drive her back to the campground , but she seems pretty determined to keep going.   We put a extra 1.5ltr bottle of water we had in the car, in the shade behind a rock.  We figure at least she’ll have some extra water on the walk back if she drinks all she is carrying.

We get back to the campground, and I must admit we’re all a bit concerned for her welfare.  A short time later as we’re packing up some rangers turn up to clean the facilities.  We point out the X-Trail and let them know where we saw her last.  I figure they may drive in a take a look when they’re done.  Another 20-30mins later and a ute pulls in and she gets out.  It finally got too much for her and she accepted a lift back with these other travelers.  We’re all a bit relieved to see her OK.  And the water, we’ll she needed to open it on the way back.

We don’t leave the campground till around 12, the trip out is a little quicker than the one in. We go a little further down the road to Hermannsburg and get some fuel (1.95/l bargain!). We cross over the Finke River, luckily it’s not in high flow!  Then back to the intersection of the outer loop. We stopped here yesterday morning and Caitlin brought up a small ball she found on the ground. I said it wasn’t ours and dropped it (holding back all temptations to lob it as far as I could into the bush!). Later that afternoon we realised is the ball from our cricket set, must have fallen out when I opened the boot. A quick stop at the intersection again, one ball rescued!

It’s only another 40km to Redbank Gorge which is our planned stop for the night. We park the van up and drive to the carpark for the gorge. Here we find out it’s a further 1.2km (30min) walk to the gorge. Rightfully Dawn’s had enough walking for today so we take her back to the van and venture out ourselves. The track starts our fine enough, but after about 500m the track is gone and we’re just walking along the sand of a dry riverbed. Then the riverbed is replaced with rocks and we clambering over these. Are we going the right way? Eventually we get to the gorge and it’s pretty spectacular, we have a dip and the water is really cold. It’s late so we only have about 30min before we decide it’s time we should start heading back. On the way back we treated to a couple of rock wallabies who’ve come out to graze. All up it was nice, but probably not worth the walk in this case.

Today the fridge has been playing up, we’ve cranked up (down) the temperature, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. I have a look in the top vent and eventually find that one of the refrigerant pipe has broken, “there’s your problem”. Damn. We’ll need to head back to Alice in the morning and try and get it fixed. That, and a fridge full of food will probably need to be dumped. Luckily we’re now only about 140km from Alice, so it’s shouldn’t take too long. We’ll plan to do our Alice attractions and maybe we can we can head back out here for a day or two later in the week.