RV FEATURE
In hindsight, it was a foolhardy idea:
follow the dotted-line in my map north of
Oodnadatta to Finke, then Chambers Pillar,
on the way to Alice Springs.
We’d been on the first part of this road that
leads to Mount Dare, the gateway to the
Simpson Desert, before. But that was 18
years earlier.
We expect roads to improve with time in
most places, but that excludes this speck of
the globe. I recalled that the side-track to Mt
Dare from Hamilton Station was then better
described as a track even goats avoided
rather than a road which involved a deep
creek crossing.
But we weren’t taking that turn-off and
despite reports of heavy rain in Alice Springs
that had taught many dogs to swim for the
first time in the Todd River, the well-defined
road from Oodnadatta to Hamilton Station
where we free-camped for the night had been
dry and firm.
BOGGED!
The warning signs were there as we headed
off from Hamilton to Finke that morning.
Just a few kilometres from the Mt Dare
turn-off, the Finke road appeared to end
in a single pair of wheel tracks through
low grassland across a paddock. We were
accustomed to the outback ‘chicken track’
system, where difficult or boggy patches of
roads were bypassed by alternative tracks
through the surrounding bush. We had
learned to trust these tracks, as inevitability
they took us to drier ground and returned
us to the main road. As there were no
obvious chicken tracks leading off this
single paddock course, we concluded that it
must be okay to use.
It went well for a few kilometres before
we notice that our rig was struggling as
the wheel tracks became softer. Back
to low range, with DSC skid control off
to prevent it from limiting the power we
might need to maintain our momentum
through soft patches.
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