Travelling through inland Australia: Day 28 King's Canyon

16 June

Last night we had a light dinner at the resort bar and bistro. It was a truly unique experience.

We got there just before sunset and ordered a glass each of what turned out to be two very acceptable house wines.

This is no typical smoky, claustrophobic, deafening bar. Instead it is open to the fresh desert air. Outside, a fire is roaring in a fire pit. Inside the resort’s resident Australian Country singer is entertaining us superbly with his poetry and his music and the air is becoming redolent of barbequing meat.

Very soon we reach the dying of the day. The westbourne sun fires the clouds with the oranges, yellows and reds of a desert sunset. Suddenly a dingo bitch emerges from the mulga scrub opposite us and lopes across the road. No cringing cur, she. She is a dingo mother in all her strength and pride. With head erect and ears pricked she is intent on finding a feed for her pups and herself and is utterly disdainful of all the human activity going on around her.

For me, it doesn’t get any better than this. It is the combination of circumstances like these that leave me feeling truly thankful for being alive.

After we had eaten and spent a truly enjoyable time listening to our singer, we strolled home under a sky as black as velvet and sparkling with an impossible number of stars, feeling totally content.

Today the adventure continued.

We finally found a solution to our problem of getting around the rim of the Canyon. Rather than pay the price likely to meted out to our bodies if we walked around it, we flew over it, in a helicopter no less. Yes, that's right, we ticked off another item on the bucket list. And before you kids ask "How did you ever get Mum to go up in a helicopter?", let me tell you that I didn't have to do a thing. It was all her idea. Mind you, she was careful to take a Valium before we took off.

We had a 15 minute flight and it was fantastic. I found that the helicopter was much more stable than I have found light fixed-wing aircraft to be in the same wind conditions and the same altitude over the same topography.

To say that the view was stunning, is a huge understatement. You can see for perhaps a 100 or more kilometers. We could just make out Kata Tjuta on the horizon.

It also put everything we had been looking at over the last few days into is proper context. We discovered that the Canyon is just a small part of an immense massif or plateau, the top of which was once the land surface 400 million years ago and which was left behind when the rest of the land surface was eroded down to its present level.

Perhaps the best way of understanding it is to imagine that the plateau is a gigantic oblong vanilla slice (at this point my overseas readers will have to do a search on "Australia Vanilla Slice" on their favourite search engine). One end of the oblong is level with the present land surface while the other end rears up several hundred metres above the plain. The escarpment we drove along when coming into King's Canyon Resort, is the George Gill range and forms the closer long edge of the vanilla slice. The end of the range, Carmichael's Crag, is at the corner of this edge.

Now imagine that the smooth icing top of the vanilla slice has become dried out over time and is now crossed by cracks and is pitted and dimpled. That's what the top of the plateau looks like. Now also imagine that the once sharp edge of the vanilla slice has become dried out and very crumbly. It is still there but it has become scalloped and curved with large piles of crumbs building up along the bottom edge. Now imagine that someone has come along with a big knife and cut a wedge into the side of the vanilla slice. It does not extend far into the vanilla slice but goes right down through its thickness. This is King's Canyon and instead of being created by a big knife, it has been created by a creek that has flowed along a crack in the top of the vanilla slice and over a long time (400 My) has carved out the crack until it has become this really big canyon. If all this makes sense to you, then you understand the basics of the geomorphology of the George Gill range.

Hopefully, the photos will make all this clearer. I hope to be able to load these when we get to somewhere with mobile phone coverage, probably Erldunda.

Tomorrow is our last day here and we intend to use it as a lay day and do nothing but begin packing up. So, I don't expect to make another post until we get to Erldunda. In the meantime I have a small puzzle for you. Erldunda is famous for something, a something that could be a little bit controversial, what is it?