Weather still fine, clear sunny with some clouds. Overnight it was 6C – hard to believe as we are snug in the trailer.
We said goodbye to Kooloman Camp this morning. It has been a great camp and we have had it to ourselves for the past few days. We headed east and then north to Alpana Station to hand in our gate key and track guide booklet. Travelling further north to Blinman, we wanted to refuel, but discovered that the nearest fuel is 17 kms to the west at Angorichina Village. Taking this into account, we decided that we would continue back out to Parachilna and head north to Leigh Creek and restock with food and fuel and take the alternate route to Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges NP. Leigh Creek has the only supermarket around for quite a few hundred kilometres and by restocking here, we are going to extend our trip to include part of the Strzelecki track (Mt Hopeless to Maree).
We were going to take the road east to Balcanoona, (turn right at Blinman) then travel west to Leigh Creek originally.
On our loop drive yesterday, we missed a section of the road from Blinman to Parachilna – so covered this today.
Above is the start of the Heysen Walking Trail – This section goes south to Aroona Valley where we were camped. We would love to do that walk at some stage. Unfortunately again we need two cars to do it.
The road north to Leigh Creek – nice and open and flat. Birdsville is listed, but we are first going to do a lot of side trips before we get on the Birdsville Track.
This is called Porcupine Grass – and as you drive along they look like Porcupine, well that is until we stopped and I tried to find one to photograph and they all started to look like clumps of grass.
This was just short of Leigh Creek – I think this photograph really captures what we were seeing. The Leigh Creek railway like is just to the right. It transports coal all the way to the Port Augusta power station.
Leigh Creek was moved from its’ original location as it was sitting on a coal basin in the 1980’s and the town rebuilt. I was thinking this will be great, modern, easy to get around. How wrong I was. The Romans always built grid system, efficient, easy to get around but then you bring in modern designers who all think curves are best. The streets were very narrow – squeezy if two cars are parked opposite each other. The school is on the main street into town – so everyone is down to 25 km at school time. The shopping centre is on the side on a hill, no parking for caravans or camper trailers. Trucks would have trouble trying to negotiate the streets. It was congested– it has the only supermarket for hundreds of kilometres and is a major restock for anyone on the road, so why design a town like that?. Having said that, the supermarket a Foodtown Store, was very reasonably priced and had a good stock of everything. The first couple of aisles were for clothing, nic nacs etc. The shelves were overflowing and I did wonder who would want to buy a hedgehog with purple sparkly feathers as quills. The miners must have a soft side to them.
As there was no bread at the supermarket, we called into Copely to the Bush Bakery to see if we could get a loaf of bread. Again “Bakery” is a loose term as they didn’t actually bake anything, we could get some frozen white bread. It was a bit like Fawlty Towers as the owner was a entertainer and although funny, quite out of his depth even trying to make a cup of coffee. I ended up telling him how to make our coffees and finishing it off – anyway we walked out of there with a smile on our faces.
All the roads are open.
As we approached the National Park, we could see Lake Frome in the distance. Between the ranges there are vast expanses of flat grassland.
Take a drive with us through the gorge.
We have taken the 4WD track into Grindell Hut to camp. It is 17 kms off the Arkaroola Road and takes about an hour to drive.
The poor kayak hasn’t seen any water for a while. All of these creeks and rivers are dry and basically flash flood, no hope of doing a paddle for quite a while.
We had a lovely sunset at camp. All in all today we travelled 260 kms.
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