Day 143 | Near Gosse Bluff: is that the pitta, patta of rain on the tent?

68 km | zzOz total: 7,426 km

If the first explorers had travelled through these parts in these lush conditions there would have been a rush of settlers out here.

The countryside has been burnt off, both natural lightning strike and the local arsonists, but with the rain the recent growth radiates an iridescent lime green.

Today was a day, the road better for travel but incredibly hard on the wrists with the bumping over that uncrushed natural gravel, where horses abounded.

First up was a real snorter, making noise while I’m still horizontal, solitary, trying for a whiff to work out what that orange tent was all about, charging around, hoof on rock, seemingly indignant that I’d chosen that quite decent campsite. (Actually my favourite place for a while with the hills around, the wind in the mulgas and my tent pegs going straight in the sand.)

Later there were groups of 5, 7 and 6, too far away to be concerned by my squeaky Brooks Flyer seat.

In terms of lushness this could be through the Waikato, ie, NZ, except there are no white painted fences and the horses, almost universally that chestnut colour, have stunted thickset legs, maybe that’s the brumby thing. Oh, another difference might be the road.

One solitary beast made a show of running along with me, wheeling around, a lot of snorting, and energy expended, 100 m away.

I exercise what may be my last mob of 5 camels which canter through the spinifex 400 m away, hemmed in by cliff for a couple of kilometres. The total count of the humped ungulates is over the 100 mark since Laverton but they haven’t ever been too keen to stick around.

The agenda today is Gosse Bluff, 6km off the road on a track advertises as 4 × 4 only, but which turns out to be a breeze for the most part, just increasingly uphill.

Gosse Bluff was created when a frozen CO 2 gas comet, about 1000m across, smacked into the Earth about 145.5 million years ago. Unsurprisingly it created quite the crater, about 20km in diameter originally, but with the passage of time the ground level has eroded about 2km, so the sign tells me, and none of the evidence remains.

What does is where the impact affected the rock deep underground, ie, tilted it 90°, which is now what is exposed with a savagely jagged rim.

There’s so much to take in here: the ridiculously huge time scale, how scientists worked out such a precise moment of impact, the 2 km of rock moving off somewhere else, somehow, the comet whacking into the Earth and wiping out every living thing in an area about the current size of the continent, the current jagged rim, etc.

Th real experience is to make your way through a gap in this geological structure and stand on a jagged rock mound right at Ground Zero, in the centre of the most magnificent amphitheatre, outside diameter 5 km, the inner one would still seat a few million people, except for that needle sharp spinifex.

Awesome.