Lake Eyre South, but not north, and rain in the outback!

If you’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed I finished up my last story with our arrival at Muloorina Station, a 1,000,000 acre station north or Marree and close to Lake Eyre. The camp ground here is on a spectacular spring ranging from “burn yourself” at the source to “ahoy icebergs” further down. At $10/night it was a little bit of paradise that we were looking forward to enjoying.

We debated coming up this way once we realised we wouldn’t be able to visit Lake Eyre North, the larger of the two lakes. We discovered this a couple of weeks earlier when we tried to book our vehicle permit to enter the national park and found that the first available one wasn’t until 1 July. No worries, we thought, must be an issue with their booking system. So we rang up to ask, only to hear a tale about dramas between the pastoralists who own the land, and the South Australian government body who help maintain the public access roads on this private land. After the floods of last year when the roads were yet again washed away, there was no money to fix them, so they weren’t fixed. Following a grant from the Federal government, work could get underway again, but of course, being government, things had to go to tender, be discussed at length, contracts awarded, contractors mobilised…the end result being that the roads weren’t fixed and were closed. Pretty disappointing for the many, many travellers who had come a long way for the winter season to visit the lake.

So we found ourselves 46 km from the lake with no way to get there, except for Jim to give it a crack on his bike (pushbike that is). Which is what he did, armed with a bit of food, water and the trusty Garmin InReach satellite phone, with instructions to use it to message me on the hour, every hour as a safety precaution (he was heading out into the desert, on a closed road after all).

The plan was solid, but we hadn’t accounted for a global issue with the Garmin messaging system which resulted in none of the messages getting through to me. So while I stewed back at camp wondering if Jim was nursing a snake bite or knocked out cold after stacking it off his bike, he was diligently sending me messages on the hour every hour wondering why I didn’t bother replying. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I worked out there was a messaging issue and stopped stressing, and he turned up at around lunchtime, having made it halfway (so to Lake Eyre South, a 40km round trip).

It was about this day also that we started taking more notice of the weather forecast, which unbelievably was predicting rain the day before we were due to leave. The roads here are just dirt, and red clay-like dirt at that, so a little bit of rain causes them to shut for two reasons – one to protect the roads, and two, to stop people sliding all over the place and getting into trouble. We watched the forecasted rain getting steadily worse for a couple of days then made the decision to bail out a day early and head along the Oodnadatta Track to William Creek, South Australia’s smallest town.

And what a good thing we did.

As is our usual way, we packed up as much as we could the day before to make our leaving day exit as painless as possible. We also decided we should be on the road by 8am, to keep in front of the rain, predicted to start falling from around 9:30am. It was to be our first time ever just staying one night somewhere too, so we had to plan ahead a bit and have what we needed for William Creek so as to not need to unpack the car. With all that done, we headed for Marree to fuel up. Looking to the east we could see a huge wall of rain a couple of hundred km’s long, but still a little way off, so we got going to keep in front of it.

Halfway along we stopped at Lake Eyre South and walked out and on to the lake. No water in it at the moment, so we could walk on the salty surface and have a bit of a look around. It is enormous, so I can only imagine (until next time I guess) how big Lake Eyre North is.

It wasn’t until we stopped for lunch that the heavens opened, so we had our desert picnic in the car, watching the rain come down. With thunder and lightning. Unbelievable. We made it into William Creek, and because it had stopped raining, we made the decision to stay there the night, hoping that the rain was done.

It wasn’t of course, and we spent the afternoon in the tent while the rain came down, then the evening in the pub crossing our fingers that the rain would stop and the roads would remain open. Can’t fault the food at the pub – the goat curry was excellent, and bonus points to them for letting the dog into the main bar bit so we could be nice and warm and dry.

In the morning, we checked the roads report. Everything, from our campground at Muloorina Station right through to William Creek was now closed, but the road we needed to take to the east was open (with a care warning in place). No need to tell us twice, we packed up in almost zero visibility fog (again, who knew!), and drove out of there before anyone decided they were changing their mind about the road status. I’ll be interested to see how long the road stays closed, and therefore how long we would have been trapped in our last spot.

But things fell in our favour this time, and while it was a slow trip, sometimes with extremely limited visibility due to the fog, we made it into Coober Pedy and back on the bitumen in time for our reward…three nights in a “cave house”. A very solid roof over our heads! Lucky too, as two more days of rain are predicted…

PS – Just as a little aside…part of this drive (and in fact the town of William Creek itself) falls within Anna Creek Station, the largest working cattle station in the world. At 5,800,000 million acres, it’s bigger than Israel. It’s also bigger than the next biggest station (which is in the Northern Territory and is a mere 2,000,000 acres) and over seven times bigger than the biggest ranch in Texas (a tiny 830,000 acres). I remember those years in Texas where we heard “everything is bigger in Texas” to which we’d say “ahh, but have you been to Australia?”. The sheer size of this country is quite mind-boggling.