The Simpson Desert. That name immediately brings to mind remote, long distance, outback travel. At least it does to me and for a a few years, traversing the Simpson has been an itch that just needed to be scratched. Jill and I recently completed something that seemed as mammoth as going to the moon only a couple of years ago; crossing the Simpson Desert twice. It was a fantastic experience and we enjoyed it immensely, more so than we anticipated. The diversity of terrain, scenery and driving conditions had us thinking about a return even before finishing the second crossing. In one direction we travelled solo west & north from Birdsville via the QAA Line and Hay River Track, exiting to the Plenty Highway at Jervois Station and across to Alice Springs. The return crossing from Mt Dare was with our friends Jon & Maya in their 2016 Defender via French Line / Rig Road / WAA Line / Knolls Track / QAA. Before meeting them we visited Chambers Pillar and travelled the Old Andado Track, filling in some missing pieces from that area when we passed through in 2016. The final section down to Innamincka was via the Walkers Crossing Track which is a route we had not taken on previous trips.
A few quick highlights and statistics:
Brisbane > Birdsville via Mitchell, Windorah and Haddons Corner Desert crossing (3 nights) Plenty Highway including night at Gemtree Alice Springs (2 nights) Chambers Pillar Old Andado Track to Mt Dare Desert crossing (4 nights) Birdsville > Innamincka Innamincka > Brisbane via Eulo Total dist: 5,687 km Time away: 21 days Fuel consumption: ~12L/100km on roads and 16L/100km for the crossings
Days 1 to 3 - Brisbane to Birdsville. 1,686 km
First night in Mitchell; ordinary and nothing to recommend sadly. Would plan to overnight somewhere else if heading this way again. Second night in Windorah; excellent and highly recommend the Western Star. Will stop here again if opportunity arises. We were there for the Sunday night bbq and it was a good vibe. The staff are friendly and the rooms are well maintained.
Also found this mirror dish creating an interesting reflection right on the edge of town.
On the third day we detoured to Haddon Corner on the way to Birdsville. Haddon is our second corner ticked off after visiting Cameron Corner two years ago and we planned to complete the trifecta later this trip.
At the other end of this fence line is Poeppel Corner, right on a salt pan and in the middle of the Simpson Desert. Surprisingly, the drive to Haddon was quite enjoyable, heading into wide open country down the Planet Arrbury Road. It's a slightly strange thing to detour into the middle of nowhere to a completely arbitrary point on the map.
After previous trips I have come to think that crossing the Cooper Creek is getting into the "real" outback. This was the crossing outside Windorah that forced us to detour south to Innamincka two years ago in 2016 racing to cross in front of flood waters travelling down from a flooded Winton. The true fanning out into a mariad of water courses known as "channel country" starts immediately south of this point and has become more than 10km wide by the time it gets near Innamincka.
Being back in Birdsville felt pretty good. Since I was a kid this has always been the byword for the outback if you're from Queensland. The place where adventures start.
After checking in to the hotel, which was a first for us having stayed at the caravan park last time, we headed out to see a couple of things we missed on the last trip. The first was one of the few remaining groves of ancient Waddi trees about 10km north of town. They are an extremely rare, slow-growing desert tree. The timber is said to be so hard that it's almost impossible to saw but also famously used as fence posts that last for 100 years or more, so maybe not quite impossible.
Reminds me of the pine trees we used for Christmas when I was a kid but they are actually from the wattle family.
On the way back to town we pulled over and got pretty close to a couple of wedge tail eagles. This proximity is not that easy because they usually fly off if you're driving but there was a pair that seemed to be hanging around a cattle grid.
And finally the steaming outlet of the artesian basin well that supplies water to the town.
So that was a good day even though it was effectively just getting to the start line. Also worth mentioning that the Birdsville Hotel is very well organised and the rooms out the back are large, comfortable and clean.
Day 4 - Birdsville to free camp along QAA Line. 131 km
Started the day with what would prove to be the only vehicle related issue of the trip for the D4, a flat tyre from what must have been a slow leak overnight. Not a bad place to change a tyre in the hotel carpark and because it was still early I decided to take it around to the roadhouse to see if a repair could be undertaken.
Jill suggested simply rolling the wheel around the corner and down the block on the footpath as the quicker option and luckily enough one of the guys was able to get straight on it. The pin hole was so small it took some finding and was actually a tiny but very sharp rock shard that had embedded into a tread block. The last 100km into Birdsville had been very rough and rocky and maybe reducing tyre pressure by a few psi would have prevented it but considering how sharp it was and buried into the tread block, maybe it would have got in regardless. Anyway I thought $45 for an internal patch was very reasonable and I would have put it straight back on the car but I'd already changed to the spare and didn't feel like repeating that process. I rolled it back to the hotel & put it up as the spare.
And then we were off into the desert. Over Big Red the easy way and into the distance chasing the little snaking line of the track.
The first few dunes were relatively tall and the views into the distance quite spectacular. Crossing the dry bed and channels of Eyre Creek was our first introduction to the amazing diversity of scenery in the Simpson and you could see how messy things would get with even a small amount of rain. The flaky mud had an odd consistency, it almost looked shiny & wet but was actually dry as a bone.
Many of the bigger dunes are early on when starting from the east but we didn't seem to have too much trouble; generally taking it quite steadily in low range and using the paddle shift as required to keep in the torque band on the softer bits. We did however notice that the western face of many of the dunes was badly chopped up with axle-twisting "wombat" holes and lumps, which was something we'd have to deal with on the return crossing in a couple of weeks. Traffic coming the other way was pretty light, I think we passed three groups and one solo vehicle. This actually made us feel slightly more comfortable because we too were heading off into what was apparently very remote and lightly travelled parts by ourselves. Leading up to the trip I did have some doubts around travelling solo so seeing other people doing the same thing helped. Our first camp in the Simpson was a great little spot between dunes in amongst the gidgy trees about 90km along the QAA Line and within the Queensland National Park. It was a beautiful evening, the first of many with a staggering quality of light and colour we would experience. Sadly we don't have a camera that can take shots of the night sky because the show on offer of the Milky Way was amazing.
I'll include this map of our crossing routes again later. The blue line and dots shows our outbound route and campsites, the red is the west-east return and pink is the Old Andado approach to Mt Dare.
Day 5 - QAA Camp to Hay River Camp. 113 km During the first full day solely in the desert we passed through a diverse range of terrain without seeing anyone else. I had read that the Hay River Track was less used but hadn't expected so little traffic. It also felt good to get back into the swing of camping & travelling including establishing the setup and pack up routines that are such a large part of overlanding when you're on the move every day.
Before too long the large salt pan close to the QLD/NT border came into view. It runs almost north-south for more than 20km and marks the location where we turn right to head north on the Hay River Track.
This was the first salt pan that we'd actually experienced up close, having flown over Lake Eyre two years ago but not had time to go out to it on the ground. The crunchy, fluffy crust has a strange consistency but the track across has been hardened like concrete by the traffic. This is another place that would be a nightmare to traverse if wet.
Once across the salt pan we looked around to confirm which way to the start of the Hay River Track. Not much of a fanfare for the start of the track. Permits from the Central Land Council and Atnetye Land Trust are required to traverse the Hay River Track.
The first northwards run along the edge of the salt pan was reasonably fast, which caused the sad loss of our homemade sand flag. It escaped from the flag pole never to be seen again and had to be replaced with a professional version in Alice Springs. However, I did keep the flag pole on the roof for the return crossing figuring he'd done nothing wrong and deserved to finish what he'd started. Further on the track follows an old shot line crossing dunes and passing by abandoned oil wells. Jill drove this section and up to the camp. The dunes were medium or small and varied in spacing. The terrain between dunes was also variable, sometimes there was the more typical wide flat swale, other times the ground was lumpy and scored by water erosion channels. The broken ground made for slow going. In this shot it's actually hard to pick the dunes in the landscape.
At around 4pm we found another reasonably secluded camp site amongst the trees between dunes not too far off the track.
Only the second night and it's already an amazing trip.
Day 6 - Hay River Camp to Lake Caroline. 202 km Our research suggested that pushing through to Lake Caroline would be a good option. Well the day's travel was excellent but the destination itself didn't really live up to expectations .... more on that later. We set off after a nice breakfast in camp and pottered along in a generally northwards direction. The driving was pretty easy but quite slow. The terrain is broken up by small dunes, sandy knolls, minor creek channels, erosion gullies and stands of trees or bushes. This means a lot of tight corners and dips best tackled at an easy pace, which I actually really enjoyed even though your concentration level needs to be maintained. And there's plenty of very scratchy spinafex close to the track that made me glad to have applied the Paint Shield film. Once again we appeared to be the first vehicle along the track for a couple of days at least, with the dune crests blown clean and many dingo tracks. This really added to the sense of remoteness and isolation. And this area had some of the reddest dunes we would come across the whole trip.
By late morning we had made it to the section of track intersecting with the Madigan Line between camps 15 and 16. Camp 16 is famous for a blaze tree. The blaze is completely grown over and the tree appears in excellent health. Madigan led 9 men and 19 camels through the desert in 1939 in what was one of the last truly exploratory journeys across the harsh and trackless middle of Australia. When planning our trip I didn't feel confident enough to tackle the Madigan solo but I now hope to return one day and take that route.
There was a photo in the visitor's book of a much younger tree which I recall as being taken in 1972 but am questioning my memory now.
We continued on at a slow pace, the track switching back and forth across the wide dry water course of the Hay River. The lack of speed allowed us to see lots of detail in the landscape and that included these two falcons trying to hold steady against the high wind, which had been increasing all day.
The going got a bit faster as the day wore on and we still hadn't seen anyone when all of a sudden a huge offroad truck appeared around a corner and I cleared the track in surprise. In the end there were four of the big trucks and two standard utes in the group. They commented about the slow average speed so far that day and I thought well that's not going to improve as you go south. Finally arrived at the Lake Caroline turn-off reasonably late in the afternoon but with still enough light to get out there and set up camp. First we had to tackle the deep soft sand of the main course of the Hay River. This was the only section that required low range for the day and was very bouncy thanks to huge ruts. On the other side of the sand we met only the second group of travellers we were to see on the whole track. They suggested that the lake was not a good prospect for camping and to have a quick look and come back and camp by the river. Well that was excellent advice and exactly what we did. Lake Caroline is a very large mud pan that's extremely harsh and exposed; see it but we don't recommend camping at it. We set up camp at a good site right by the main river bank after re-crossing the deep sand and had a very nice evening, including star gazing into the completely clear sky.
But that all changed at 1:30am !!! A massive southerly change came through with what felt like cyclonic winds when you're in a tiny swag tent. Both of us woke up around the same time not quite sure what was going on but feeling that something was wrong.
We had just enough time to get the awning rolled up and anything left out back in the car before it hit with a vengeance; winds wild enough to have destroyed the swags unless we stayed in them as human ballast. We didn't have time to pack them away so just stayed in them.
It kept up until after 5am but the Oztent Bunkers survived without any damage. There was a point when a handful of rain drops fell and I started to have visions of huge amounts of rain and terrible muddy tracks. But thankfully the rain stopped at literally just a few drops. The Bunker is an excellent product that we are very happy with. However not being a sealed tent meant that plenty of red sand had blown inside during the storm and I looked like an Oompa Loompa or a bad Trump impersonator. You can see in this photo the power of the wind, that excavation around the wheel was not there before and there was no ground water during the storm, just the couple of rain drops.
And here was our reward in the morning, a beautiful clear sky. We learned later that the storm went on to impact on places as far apart as Alice Springs and Mt Isa.
Day 7 - Lake Caroline to Gemtree. 390 km We took it easy over breakfast, recovering from the fury of the previous night and cleaning red sand out of nooks and crannys best not mentioned here. Plus our plan was to only go as far as Batton Hill, which is the campground run by the land owners and only around 100km up the track. The scenery that day we found a little boring if I'm honest. It was clear we were heading out of the truly desert environment and we also tracked away from the Hay River water course. The countryside had been grazed and was generally featureless and partly cleared for livestock. One milestone was crossing the Tropic of Capricorn. In the photos below you can see two ways the Tropic is marked in the NT. On the left is what greets you when heading south on the Stuart Highway into Alice Springs, which we did the following day. On the right is the marker on the Hay River Track ....
In the end we got to Batton Hill around lunch time and there was no one around. It did not look like a place we wanted to hang around for a whole afternoon so we pushed on. The road out to the Plenty Highway was 70km of corrugations that just had to be endured but the highway itself was in very good condition. After refueling at Jervois Station we kept going all the way to Gemtree Caravan Park and booked a basic donga for the night. Gemtree is well setup and we were glad to have continued to there for the night.
Statistics for the desert crossing: Birdsville to Jervois Station 628km and 96 litres used for an average of 15.3 L/100km This reflects the balance between crossing dunes and the easy sections.
Straight to Part 2 of the trip report.
