Australia Adventure Travel - Hot on the Trail (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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The Hard Way
Hot on the Trail (Cont.)

THE CONSENSUS of the Tibooburra pub is that I should stick to the main dirt track to reach Innamincka, a day's drive through scrub plains and foot-deep bull dust. It's one of the few regions on earth where it's possible to die if your car breaks down. You hide out in the sweltering shade of your vehicle, drink emergency water, and wait for another car to pass by. If no one happens along in 48 hours, you're cooked. In 1963, a family of five perished this way.

Instead, I navigate an obscure sandy path to a watering hole called Olive Downs, where I count 27 kangaroo carcasses locked in the fractured mud. I bump along "jump-ups," hillocks of rock and sand, and, following a trail that's no wider than my truck, cross the breadth of Sturt National Park. Named for Charles Sturt, one of only a handful of explorers who preceded Burke and Wills, the desolate country seems little changed since the summer of 1844, when Sturt and several teammates rode horses north from Adelaide into the desert. Some 800 miles inland, they found a network of intermittent channels and permanent warm-water billabongs, which they christened Cooper's Creek, after a South Australian judge.

Between 1855 and 1858, surveyor Augustus Gregory had made several bold desert journeys, including an enormous boomerang-shaped trek that ran from Brisbane, on Australia's east coast, clear out to Cooper's Creek, then hooked south to Adelaide, leaving only a 700-mile section between Cooper's Creek and the Gulf of Carpentaria unexplored. Gregory and his men went on horseback, lived off the land, and set a precedent for traveling extraordinarily light.

Likewise, his fellow explorer John Stuart accomplished five successful journeys in the early 1860s, eventually crossing Australia east to west. Stuart also traveled light, with his horse, Polly, and a few saddlebags. In more than 12,000 miles of desert, he never lost a man.

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