About 800m along the trail I came to the Finke River hikers camp. There was a guy laying on one of the tent pads just kicking back listening to a podcast or something. Turns out he was waiting for his girlfriend to return from doing her uni test. The hikers camps look so well set up and would be a great place to stay if you were through hiking.
From Finke River the rest of the day’s walk was through pretty barren, rocky landscape. Major fires went through a big section of the park at the start of 2019 and burnt all the spinifex, grass and trees in their path. It’s left the landscape bare and rocky and it’s hard to imagine how it will recover. There are signs of green in certain areas, but there hasn’t been enough meaningful rain to really make a difference. That certainly shows with all the dry creeks I’ve crossed along the way. There has been absolutely no water other than the waterholes at Redbank Gorge and Ormiston Gorge and even those have been small compared with photos I’ve seen. Some photos and blogs show the waterhole at Ormiston Gorge filling the whole gorge and people needing to wade or swim across!
Along the way I met a group of hikers who stayed at Ormiston Gorge last night. They were sprawled out under one of the few trees around and they all looked pretty exhausted. This is day 10 for them and the previous day they’d woken up at midnight to leave Serpentine Chalet Dam to get to a Mt Sonder lookout for sunrise! The girl doing the uni tests and her partner were also part of the group. Apparently that girl has been studying every night when they finish hiking for the day.Today’s walk was fairly flat with a few small hills. The ground was mostly rocky and fairly easy to walk on. I’m much happier with my trail runners than my boots. Makes me wonder if, all those nights in the alps when my feet were sore, they could have been not sore with different shoes! I had just assumed feet get sore after big days of hiking.I arrived back at Camp Jubbie in time for lunch. In the afternoon we headed to Glen Helen, the closed lodge, for a look around Glen Helen Gorge. There’s a really lovely body of water with long grasses all around. There’s a lot of water – to get through the gorge you’d need to go for a swim.
From there we decided to check out the end of tomorrow’s walk at Serpentine Chalet Dam. Along the way we came across an English couple with a flat tyre who didn’t know how to change it and had no mobile coverage. Jubble helped them change the tyre before continuing on our way.Back at camp I got ready for my big day of hiking tomorrow and just chilled. Another delicious Chef Jublé dinner of gnocchi with veggies and an early night.
Kerry's Hikes 