Flinders Ranges in a day ... can it be done?!

The plan had been a road trip to the Limestone Coast, but the pandemic changed all this, due to the proximity to Victoria, which at the time was on the strictest lockdown. Instead, we spent the week doing day trips ... and for a week when we had to dodge showers and dress for winter, we did an amazing amount. The forecast had been for rain and unseasonable cold, and this didn't tell the half of it ... snow fell in South Australia on Friday -- luckily, we'd done our day trip into the Flinders Ranges on Thursday, because the storm which brought the snow was coming in just as we drove south! We might have been lucky once or twice ... in retrospect, if the heavy weather had arrived even 12 hours earlier, we could have been caught out in the wilderness when the "floodways" started to run, unable to get back to civilization! I guess Dave's guardian angel was looking out for us, because we didn't get caught, and we did have a fantastic time...

Salvation Jane -- "Patterson's Curse" -- in full bloom

This isn't the wilderness, but you can see it from here!

I wouldn't have believed you could do this in a day ... Flinders Ranges, out and back, between 6:00am and 9:30pm, including a storm?! It had to be a joke. But no -- it turned out to be perfectly doable; and this was Thursday in "vacation week." (Previously, we'd stayed in our own neck of the woods, getting as far afield as the Laratinga Wetlands on the other side of Mount Barker, and Mannum (it rained), via Mount Pleasant (so cold, I had to drink hot chocolate to get back to life); and on Saturday we headed south and stumbled over the Ferries McDonald Conservation Park, where the wildflowers and orchids are in full bloom.) 

But Thursday was the day to hit the road early. The sun was barely up when we left, and the magic works because the Northern Expressway whisks you through the city and out so fast. Before you know it, you're north of Port Wakefield, and looking forward to breakfast with a view of the pink lake at Lochiel, on the euphoniously named Lake Bumbunga. No, that's not a typo. From then on, you put your foot down and tramp it. In convoy with an enormous number of trucks going both ways, you're headed for Port Broughton, Port Pirie, Port Augusta -- but you're not stopping. Blast straight through, and bear right just as you see Port Augusta in the distance ... you're on your way to Quorn, known as the Gateway to the Flinders Ranges. And yes, you can do it, from home, by about 11:00am! 

Emus in the wild -- bigger and redder than you see them down south in the Adelaide Hills

Flinders Ranges pastoral country ... cattle country, in fact.

You're soon off the beaten path. The roads are in good condition, and a car can handle them ... until or unless it starts to rain, and the "flooodways" fill up fast. In retrospect, I think we were lucky!

So ... Flinders Ranges in a day! Out before dawn, a sausage roll for breakfast at Locheal, with its pink lake, north of Port Wakefield, then lunch in Quorn, followed by three hours of tarryhooting on wilderness roads where the views are beyond amazing, before we turned for home at 4:00, with a four-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of us. We returned by a different rout ... Willmington, Gladstone, Laura, Clare, Gawler, at which point you connect with the Northern Expressway and you'll be home in less than an hour. 

The trip had one last amazement in store for us:

As I mentioned before, the weather was due to change, big time, though we hadn't realized quite how violently it would change. In fact, in about twelve hours this storm front would be dumping snow on the Flinders Ranges! We drove right into it, at a time when it was all about torrential rain. The kind of rain where your wipers can barely keep pace. Spectacular -- also a wake-up call, to be a little more careful and plan a bit more assiduously next time! Because we'll definitely be going back; the only questions are when and how! 

World's End and Burra Creek Gorge ... watching out for Mad Max!

South Australia's mid-north agricultural region can be very picturesque.

The road out of Burra, headed for the World's End Highway. It's long, it's hot, but --

...driving these roads, you're rarely absolutely alone. It's surprising how much traffic you see.

The country's flat; the local crop seems to be hay (stock feed), and if you see field animals, they're sheep.

Big trucks abound; they're almost always carrying fertilizer and stock feed. This one's loaded.

Leaving "civilization" behind. You know the shot right at the beginning of Mad Max? Looks a lot like this!

Yet even out here, people live and work -- rainwater tanks stand in an apparent wilderness...

...and here's a crop not yet reaped. You can see that in this area, water is a precious commodity.

It's no surprise to see the water pipeline following the road from town to town.

A few weeks short of winter, and to say it's dusty is a terrible understatement!

If you're wondering how most of these pictures happen -- here's how!
Literally, a self-portrait of the photographer at work.

Signs of human activity: crops, fences, vehicle tracks in what would otherwise look like a desert --

-- a vehicle moves off-road, on a farm track, raising a duststorm. It's actually a tractor. They're plowing this!

Well on the way to World's End Highway. Just follow the signs. Surprise: good mobile phone coverage.

The mid-north is actually very busy, a hive of activity and industry --

-- windlasses provide power to a remote, arid region, supplementing the wind farms.

Heat haze shimmers over the road, turning everything into a mirage, and --

Now, you really are alone. Looks like a scene out of the old TV series, Boney --

World's End. Looks like a scene out of Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior!

Follow the signs ... parched hills rise up out of the flat, table-like landscape...

Burra Creek Gorge -- and even here, a crop's just been brought in and sheep are grazing the stubble.

Long, long zoom into the distance: a homestead at World's End. Note the tractor, bottom right.

People have been settling and farming in this area for over 150 years. The landscape is punctuated by
many ruins of the houses built by the early settlers.

Lola, the Mitsubishi Magna, takes a welcome breather at Burra Creek Gorge ... looking sharp!

The region has been completely overtaken by agriculture ... mostly "monoculture" -- hay! -- so the concept
of a biodiversity corridor for surviving wildlife is not just attractive, but increasingly critical.

Driving in the mid-north, the sky can often by hazy, the air thick and heavy with smoke.
You think, ye gods, is a bushfire coming this way? Like --

-- an explosion just over the next line of hills? But no. These fires are everywhere in the mid-north...
farmers are just "burning off" after bringing in a crop and letting sheep graze the stubble. The result...

Miles and miles of burned paddocks, some still smoldering. It smells of "burning," makes you sneeze.

Time to skedaddle! Headed "home," back to Clare, with dinner on our minds.

The road from Burra to World's End -- or at least the World's End Highway -- leads southeast, and you soon seem to leave civilization behind. The landscape starts to look a lot like the locations from Mad Max (the first one, set just before the world went mad, you know the one. Max might have been thoroughly bonkers by the end of the movie, but Mel Gibson was just 21, and still sane...).

You follow the signs, past outposts of human industry, ruins of farmsteads long forgotten, windlasses turning in the hot, restless air, sheep grazing the stubble, black paddocks that have been burned off. The air is so hot, the road shimmers like a mirage and the landscape gradually becomes even dryer, and redder, till you're seeing something very like the locations for Mad Max 2, which was retitled for American audiences and is better known overseas as The Road Warrior.

Families live and work out here -- kids grow up in these remote areas, in a heck of a lot more isolation than the kids at the center of the action of Colin Thiele's classic Sun on the Stubble. (That book was set in a very slightly fictionalized Eudunda, which might be on this very same road  -- check out the roadsign, above -- but in fact is far away from World's End, and still in a region where small towns abound. This road goes ever on, and on, and on, and...!)

We stopped, right where it tee'd, with one branch heading off to Morgan and Renmark. We do intend to visit Renmark fairly soon -- it's in the riverland, and best visited in the dead of winter when the temperature won't be prohibitive. But we weren't going the today. We we headed for World's End and the Burra Creek Gorge.

The hills rise up out of a vast, flat landscape, and going by the trees, there's good ground water at the gorge. You see stands of very old, very massive trees -- they're not waiting for rain.; they have their roots in the water table. The gorge area is astonishingly beautiful, in a stark and harsh kind of way. And tucked away in a crevasse is -- to our astonishment -- a caravan parking ground (trailer park, if you will). Not a formal caravan park, as such, just a safe area where you can legally park, uh, caravans. Several big motorhomes were parked there, and a 4x4 took off down a dirt road into the heart of the gorge. We didn't want to take the car down that road -- way too many ruts and rocks.

So at this point we turned back for Clare -- "home base" -- with dinner in mind. Well, dinner and air conditioning, and a dip in the pool!