King’s Canyon – a bit of walking, working and more rain!!

We were very sad to leave Yulara after our five nights there, but the upside was that we were off to another place of natural beauty – King’s Canyon. Once again, Discovery Parks have a monopoly on the accommodation options, with the closest campground/resort in town. The campground wasn’t quite as big as Yulara, and there wasn’t a whole town around it, but it was big enough that you could spend 20 minutes walking from one end to the next.

The kids spotted their mate Charlize as we drove in so they took off to play with her while we did all the hard work. Once again, a powered site was all we were able to get so we again had the luxury of running the heater and not worrying about solar panels.

The only real reason to come to King’s Canyon is King’s Canyon itself. The kids and Jim had the first crack at it, doing the rim walk (around 7-8km) for their first go. It’s a really impressive walk, up about 500 rock steps, then along the top of the canyon (with a very 1980’s approach to safety in terms of the cliff edge), down into the “Garden of Eden” then back up the other side to walk along the rim again. The weather was a bit rainy so they didn’t have the crowds that appeared later in the week too.

Rainy you say? In the outback? In the dry season? Yes, sadly, we arrived in King’s Canyon on the Monday and it wasn’t until the Thursday that we saw the sun. It did mean that we stretched our “no rainy day” record to seven days though – amazing!

I spent the first couple of days there working, while either dog-minding, or while the kids did their schooling and we all huddled in the tent out of the rain. When the sun finally came out though I went and did the rim walk on my own (with the crowds this time) and found it every bit as spectacular as the walks we’d done the previous week at Uluru and Kata Tjuta. The next day Jim decided he wanted to do the rim walk again to experience it in the sunshine (and see the waterfall that I saw, but wasn’t flowing when he was there). So he went back and did that, and in the afternoon I took the kids to do the two other short walks – one at the base of the canyon along the creek and one at Kathleen Springs about 30km away.

On the last full day there I decided I’d tackle the 22km Giles Track. They recommend doing this one in two days, but I had no interest in camping out in zero-degree temperatures in an even smaller tent so I needed to knock it off in one day. It was quite a challenging walk. Even though there were markers, it was extremely easy to lose the trail and have no idea where it might be (even if it was only a metre or two away from you). I had to have my wits about me to navigate it, and worked out a system of either trying to find the next marker before I left the last one, or if not that, then using the orientation of the last marker to work out where the track might be. I also relied quite heavily on the footprints of others when the markers were too far apart. I quite liked the challenge of doing it, and it was a good distraction from the fact that 22km is quite a long walk.

The track went through some pretty varied terrain too – up and over rocks, through gorges and along the top of the range which varied from grasslands to sand dunes to a lot of trees. It took me around 6.5 hours to do.

Meanwhile, Jim was back at camp doing a mini-mountain of laundry and packing things up for our departure the next day. Both of us needed a bit of a reward so we visited one of the three bars/restaurants on site for happy hour. Cheapest beer/wine we’d had in a long time $6/schooner or glass, so we made the most of that, and then had dinner there as well. Quite nice to sit in a building at a proper table – even the dog was allowed in!

The only thing about staying in King’s Canyon with the dog is that there always needs to be someone at the tent. Everything outside the campground is within the national park, and the only thing to do in the region is visit the national park. So the poor dog had a pretty quiet week in the tent with just walks around the campground to entertain him.

Speaking of dogs, this campground had quite a number of resident dingos who liked to make an appearance at around dusk. We had to be careful to pack everything away in the evening (including the fridge into the back of the car as apparently they like to tear the bag the fridge sits in to bits). A number of times during the week we were woken in the middle of the night to the sound of a pack of dingos howling.

Anyway, leaving day was upon us, and we packed up and headed off towards the Mereenie Track. This is an unsealed road of about 150km and is on Aboriginal land (so you need a permit to drive it). With permit in hand we hit the track mid-morning, mostly because yet again there was more rain on the way, and as we found on the Oodnadatta Track and in the Breakaways in Coober Pedy, driving on wet, red mud really bites.

Driving along this track, despite being unsealed, shortened our drive by about 3 hours compared to driving around the long way on the bitumen. The road was a bit corrugated and muddy in spots but wasn’t too bad. We saw a couple of brumbies and wild camels along the way, and the scenery was quite spectacular. It did rain on us, but not enough to cause us to start slipping around.

We rolled into our next spot (Glen Helen, within the West MacDonnell National Park) in the early afternoon. Unbeknownst to each other, both Jim and I had been stressing about the impending weather event – a LOT of rain due over a number of days, and some cold days too. I had an ace up my sleeve though as I knew that I’d just moved up a level in my Discovery Parks membership which entitled me to a free upgrade. Don’t ask, don’t get, so I asked when we checked in if we could upgrade to a powered site and thankfully, with a fair bit of shuffling, they managed to make it work. While we’re all set up for off-grid it is far less stressful when the weather is rubbish to know that we can both have power so I can work, and be warm with our trusty $17 Kmart heater.

So after delivering that good news, we set up and both wandered down to the Glen Helen Gorge (about a 10 minute walk, but of course in the national park so we had to go separately). We then checked out the bar in the campground which had an excellent Alice Springs IPA and a nice back deck looking out towards the gorge. A short reprieve outside in the sun before the heavens opened and situation normal for this trip resumed.

More to come next week – anyone got a boat we can borrow in case we need to sail out of here?