Flinders Ranges Trip (Roxby/Oodnadatta Track)

We got a couple extra days off this weekend for R&R (rest and recreation). Tim went to Adelaide to meet his wife who is visiting for a week. Christa and I did a tour of the Flinders Ranges to the East of Woomera.
We started in Woomera (H) and did a clockwise loop, spending most of our time in the Flinders Ranges (D, E, F), before returning to Woomera.

The first day, we went as far as Roxby Downs (B) where we typically go for our grocery shopping and ankle x-rays (if we are Tim). We stayed overnight and did a tour of the Olympic Dam Mine just north of Roxby the following morning. The town of Roxby was built to support the mine. Pretty much every one there is directly or indirectly related to the mine. It is one of the largest copper and uranium mines in the world. It also produces small amounts of gold and silver as byproducts. At the moment, the mine is completely underground, though it is possible some areas of strip mining may open in the future. Unfortunately, we were not able to take our cameras on the tour nor did the tour take us underground. I would have loved to take the 4.2 km tunnel drive down to the main working area in the mine.

After that, we headed up north onto dirt roads to meet up with the Oodnadatta Track which is along the Old Ghan rail line. At one point, we drove for 70 minutes without seeing a single other vehicle. Just miles and miles of this:


Once we reached our northern most point and turned onto the Oodnadatta Track, the traffic increased to a car every 10 minutes or so.
Turning onto the Oodnadatta Track:

Along the track, in the middle of nowhere, we stumbled across the Mutonia Sculpture Garden; a gallery of large art along the road. The little information I found on it is that mechanic Robin Cooke started it in 1997 and added a piece a year. Some of the older pieces were starting to deteriorate and/or been vandalized.
A bus mounted on a section of train bridge:

Two planes welded together:

The thing I found most interesting (as usual) was looking for remnants of the old rail line that paralleled the road.
An old section of rail bridge. Occasionally, these areas flood as you can see from the way the land has been washed out below the bridge. It is so hot and arid, though, it is tough to imagine that happening.

The old Wangianna Station. The remnants of the track pass about 30 yards in front of it.

Path of the railroad track:

An old water tower for the steam engines:

hi-res photos

Another Roo Expedition

Generally, the kangaroos lay low during the heat of the day. We tend to see them around dawn and dusk when they come out to graze. During the day, they nap in the shade of bushes and trees which are found at the bottoms of the gullies. In many areas here, these are the only places with enough moisture for the larger plants to survive. We had our last rain about two weeks ago.
Gully:

Inside a gully. There has been enough rain here recently to make the grass quite green in places.

Fortunately, there are some gullies close to where we are staying. In the map below, we are in the building just to the right of the Google Street View Guy's feet. A short walk brings us to the perimeter road and then the bush terrain to the east of the village. The closest gully is only a couple hundred feet from the road.

We have found that if you wander through the gullies in the middle of the day you will probably run across a fair number of kangaroos. There are two types of kangaroos in this region: small grey and large red. I feel that I have seen a lot of the grey ones, but not so many red ones. (In retrospect, this may not be entirely true. The female red kangaroos are much smaller and grey, so I might have seen more red kangaroos than I realized.) It has been my goal recently to get a good picture of a red kangaroo.

This is a male red kangaroo. A large male can be about my size (roughly 5'8", 160lbs).

I had my closest encounter with a kangaroo yet. A juvenile red kangaroo popped its head up out of the salt bush about 40 ft from Christa and I. It stared around for about 20 seconds before bounding off.

A bit farther on, we stumbled across several Bobtail Skinks. These are slow moving, lethargic creatures with black tongues. I got within 6 feet of this guy before noticing him. Their tales look like they have been docked.

Spider

Several different evenings, Christa spotted a beautiful spider nest outside my apartment. When I looked for the web in the morning, there was absolutely nothing there. The other night, I went out just after dusk and ran across the spider in the middle of making the web again. This happened 3-4 evenings in a row.
Web:

Spider:

While I was watching a fly flew into the web and got stuck. The spider dashed over, wrapped it up, and returned to working on the web. When the web was complete, the spider sat in the middle of the web, waiting for further bugs. When one got stuck, it wrapped it up, brought it back to the middle and ate it.

About 1:30 in the morning, I stepped out to see what was going on and the web was half gone. I don't know if the spider had dismantled it or whether he let it get destroyed by bugs hitting it. Either way, by dawn, there was no trace left of the spider or its web. Some species of spider (even in the US), eat their webs in the morning so they can reuse the materials.

higher res photos

Woomera, Animal Walk and Geocaching

I was joined by Christa on a morning walk around the Woomera perimeter road looking for kangaroos. In total, I saw more than 20. A few of them let us approach fairly closely (100ft), but most of them start fleeing when we were within 100-200 meters. Most of the time, they hear you approaching and will stare at you intently trying to figure out what to do. As the following pictures demonstrate, a common view of a kangaroo is of them staring back at you (or less interestingly running away from you). If you walk tangentially to them, they will often hold their ground. Walking towards them will most likely send them bounding away.
Plethora of kangaroos:

   

This was new: a couple kangaroos wrestling:

When we got back to the apartment building, there were several magpies that seemed to be trying to scare something away from under the balcony of the apartment's second floor. We couldn't see anything there except spider webs. Here is a magpie swooping up towards the balcony ceiling.

Another close up of a magpie in a eucalyptus tree next to the apartment.

On the bike back from the range yesterday, I got within 50ft of two emu. I have been looking for an opportunity to get a good shot of an emu, but photography is not allowed on the range. I was sorely tempted, but refrained from taking the photograph. Fortunately, today, there were emu across the street from the apartment and Christa and I got some good shots. Christa and I circled around them from opposite directions to make sure one of us would get close to them. Of course, she tricked me into going the wrong direction so she got the good photos...
Christa getting good photos of emus:

My "bad" photo of the emus. (I haven't seen hers, but I assume Christa got some better ones.)

Lastly, I did my first geocaching. We found a location about a quarter mile from our apartments. It was put up near the former residence of a guy who grew up in Woomera (1964-1980). To our surprise, what is now vacant desert land inside Woomera used to have a small neighborhood of houses. Knowing this, we could immediately spot where the old roads had been. I have now realized that a lot of the "undeveloped" land around Woomera was developed at some point. Right outside my apartment there used to be a road that has since been dug up:

Original photos.

Work

In case it is not obvious from the blog, we are actually here to work and not all our time is spent sightseeing. I figured I would give a brief overview of the what we are up to and how things are going.

          ,         and I are here in       , South Australia for work on             . Every day, we have to go to the blahblah to make sure that our                 is working. We also spend a lot of our time working on the        . Of particular concern is the       . When we are testing it, we have to take special care that the        is correctly             . 
The most recent set of tests have gone quite           . Though the           functioned correctly, there were some issues with       , causing us to            the                . Obviously, this has kept us quite busy.
Oh, one really awesome story:
                                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                            
                                              !

Other range news:
We found kangaroo dung on our equipment one morning. Kangaroos must have come through during the night and thought our equipment was a bathroom.

Duncan spotted a baby emu. It appeared to be separated from its parents.

We had a dust devil hit our shelter. Several of us were inside when suddenly the shelter was slammed by very strong winds and dust was blowing everywhere. It lasted around 10 seconds and then we saw a dust devil receding from us.

A big storm came through one evening. During the day on the range, we had very strong winds blowing red dust everywhere. I had grit in my eyes and on my teeth. I wish we could have taken pictures of the blowing dust. In the village after work, we had medium rains for several hours which is the most I have seen here. By the following morning, there were a few puddles on the road, but the rain had soaked in everywhere else.
Clouds moving in:

Lightening inside the clouds:

The Painted Desert

A link to the higher res photos... if anybody cares...

After our visit to Coober Pedy, we continued further north to Arckaringa Homestead and the Painted Desert. We had to drive about an hour and a half on dirt roads around sunset to get to the homestead where we were staying. Before it got dark, we saw some great skies.

Upon our arrival, an older farmer showed up in his pickup drinking a beer. He charged us for our rooms (cash only, no receipts) and then requested help figuring out how to run his new washing machine. Looking at maps, his homestead was at least 40 miles from the nearest town.

It was a fun (and odd) experience. The rooms were quite small and separated from each other by little more than a wall of corrugated metal. I could hear the click in the neighboring room of someone turning on/off their flashlight. A single room:

We had picked up some food for dinner along the way. They had a small kitchen area where we could prepare food if we wanted.


We hung out around the campfire comparing notes with the Aussies on how best to toast marshmallows. Several of our fellow travelers had recently completed some rough off-roading in the Simpson Desert where they were able to average only 6mph with their vehicle.

Around 10pm, all our electricity was shut off, disabling all lights in the rooms as well as the air conditioning. I did not partake in a shower the following morning, but those that did confirmed that at best there was a dribble of cold water along the shower wall. I wish we had a shot of the grammatically incorrect sign warning us not to steal their toilet paper.

Before sunrise the next morning we dashed off to the nearby Painted Desert to watch the sun come up. Waiting...

The sun hitting the hills/mesas of the Painted Desert:

Duncan then pulled out a camping stove, coffee, and coffee cups to make us coffee. Like Hermione, he must have a bag modified with an Extension Charm. It never feels like he is traveling with much but he always has all this crazy stuff with him.

We have since seen worse, but at the time, this was the worst fly situation we had come across. The locals laugh at us and tell us that it will get a lot worse in the coming months. If the flies would just stay out of my eyes, nose and ears it wouldn't be so bad. I have squished a dozen or so in my ear by mistake. All of us have ingested a few while walking or biking.

We got in a little hiking on the hills and saw some very scenic vistas.

We continued driving around dirt outback roads the rest of the morning and early afternoon. Our first destination was Oodnadatta, a small town along the track of the Old Ghan railroad. We had breakfast and resupplied at the Pink Roadhouse.

Me doing some last minute reading of the tour books. I have been berated several times for not paying attention to the scenary from the car because I am engrossed in a tour book.

On the way back, we finally found the Dingo Fence. We had looked for it the weekend before, but never found it. The dingo fence is a 3500 mile long fence built in the 1880s to keep Dingos to the north in order to protect the sheep and cattle farms in the south. Every year, multi-mile sections of the fence are lost to storms and floods and need to be repaired as quickly as possible. On bad years, dingos can kill tens of thousands of sheep.

Duncan got this great picture of the Dingo Fence with the fly in the foreground.