Adventures in Dry Camping

We survived a five day dry camp up at Ruby Gap, and are back to tell the tale! 

Two Room Shower and Toilet Tent

Trent has been collecting necessary items slowly but surely over the past few months:  two room shower/toilet tent, luggable loo (bucket with bags and toilet seat), water filter (to filter waterhole water for showering in), solar heated shower bag, big plastic jugs to haul drinking water from home, some minor adjustments to our trailer to be able to hold the water jugs with correct weight distribution,  a two-shelf zippable pantry with top for keeping the Coleman stove, ropes, stakes that hold in sand, a little fold out picnic table for the kids...you get the idea.  



Our favorite new camp thing is a SwingAway for the firepit!  Love, love, love it.  It looks like a piece of rebar that you pound into the ground next to the fire and has some attachments to hold a steel grill and a huge skillet, and a separate bar across the top to hang a billy or dutch oven or cooking pot from.  Each arm of the SwingAway can be raised or lowered depending on the size of the fire, and also swung easily away from the fire for ease of dealing with food or pots.  It's pretty fun, and hopefully will last forever!  Very Aussie out-bush.

Well, we left last Thursday morning, packed to the gills, and arrived at Ruby Gap just after lunch time.  We stopped on the way and had a bit of a picnic in a riverbed we drove through.  Our favorite camp spot was free and clear, so after Trent played with the winch for awhile...involving snatch straps, several trees, and a very long chain...we got the Disco plus trailer pulled up the sandy hill onto our beautiful riverbank retreat!  










Set up took quite until dinner, and we had to finish cooking our salmon on our Swingaway over the fire in the dark.  Very tasty though!!

Jax lighting the fire (all the kids got a turn!)

The weather while we were there was very hot and the flies were extremely bothersome, so those were the two big negatives of the trip.  It did cool off a bit at night, but we slept with all the windows of the tent open (there was netting) and it was still pretty warm.  Of course, now the kids have fun memories of "sleeping under the stars!"  The stars were just amazing every night.  Jax, Jones and Beaux would lean way back in their camp chairs and look at the Milky Way while they munched their s'mores each night.  

We saw lots of shooting stars, too, so I don't know if there are always that many going on, or if we happened to be camping at a fortuitous time of year!  During the day we tried to stay cool by playing/showering early or late and just sitting about in the shade during the hottest times.  

We brought our canopy which has a net around to keep bugs out.  It provided a nice place to sit around out of the flies when the tent was in full sun and way too hot to be in.  There is a skill to entering a screened area without letting the hundreds of flies that are camped out on your head and back in to the sanctuary...You must unzip the entry only halfway, bend way over, and let the screen scrape the flies off of you as you go in.  Quickly turn and zip up the door before they regroup and land on you again.  Presto!

A little Sudoku for Sis

Jax reading at the picnic table

Jones memorizing his Ninjago Encyclopedia

Luckily, the kids had books and games to occupy them while it was too hot to actually move around.  I must say, however, sitting for hours in those camp chairs is an intense form of torture.  We may have to invest in some better camp furniture; maybe the director type chair would be more comfortable?

We did have a long hike one day to try to find Fox's Grave.  It is an 8 km trek through Ruby Gap, on through Glen Annie Gorge, and then up the river a bit and over a hill...and back.  But we found it!  The story goes that Fox was after rubies at Ruby Gap, but when it came out that they were only garnets, he killed himself.  He has a lovely gravestone chiseled and his grave is all covered with rocks, but it is a little elusive.  We were lucky to find it this time, because Trent looked and looked last time we came and couldn't locate it.  

Heading off for our hike!  The kids call this section "The Rocky Ranges"

We were all so hot and exhausted by the time we got back to camp after this venture!  We didn't do much other hiking this trip with the weather so warm.  The hike through the gorge is so pretty...if it were 40 degrees cooler, we would have just adored it!

Let's see...Food.  Camp food is always an interesting topic.  Our menu is somewhat limited by the foods my family will eat, but we manage.  At least, we do not usually lose weight on a camping trip!!  For dinners we had:  salmon, grilled chicken, pancakes, and hot dogs.  On the side we brought strawberries, homemade applesauce, mac n cheese, muffins, potatoes, eggs, carrots, corn, and bacon.  Lunch was usually tuna or chicken salad sandwiches, or peanut butter/jam with yogurt and fruit...some chips and pretzels may have snuck in there somewhere, too.  Camp coffee, cocoa, oatmeal, cold cereal, and crumpets in the pie iron took care of brekky nicely.  Of course, s'mores made an appearance almost every night.  Our marshmallows melted into one huge conglomeration, so we just detached chunks to roast as needed.  The fruit snacks we brought each melted to a pile of goo, so the boys thought it was pretty funny to peel those out of their little pouches and shove the whole thing in their mouths at once!  Beaux didn't think it was quite as amusing, but she ate hers too.  Notes for next time:  put mallows and fruit snacks in the cooler.  

Here's a trick that did work well for us this time:  we saved 6 plastic milk jugs before we went, washed them out really well and froze them with fresh water leaving room for the ice to expand.  We used these for ice in the cooler, so we didn't have to deal with wet food or draining issues, and when the ice did melt, we could drink nice cold water from the cleaned jugs!  We also bring as much of our food frozen as possible, to keep the cooler as cold as we can for as long as we can.  

Wildlife?  We didn't see too much...lots of birds calling, but it was hard to pinpoint them at Ruby Gap.  Their songs echo off canyon walls and you can't really tell where to look for the birds themselves.  Of course we had the normal wake up call from a crow (which sound much much more horrible in this area than a normal "caw" from a crow back home....more of a hoarse scream of injury).  We did have a visit from a huntsman spider (the really big ones) near the outhouse tent, but Trent torched it, so we're all good.  Every morning we would see the camp just littered with dingo paw prints, but we never heard or saw them in the camp!  We slept with our windows open, and Trent and I woke up a lot, but never heard a dog in camp.  Crazy silent beasts.  They aren't supposed to be scary, more like coyotes in the States than wolves.  In fact, ours were perfect ladies/gentlemen!  Although the prints were as close as a foot away from the tent, they never touched it, or tried to get into our food bins, or messed around with the toilet bags on the ground outside the "bathroom."  One night, as Trent was playing his guitar and we were all singing around the campfire, our song ended and we heard way off in the distance the song of a dingo.  That was really special and fun!  They can't bark, you know.  I believe they communicate with coughs or "singing" which is like a howl.  We decided our camp dingoes were friendly!





Another fun thing we do in the Ruby Gap area is fossick for garnets and other interesting stones.  Craig and Debbie gave Trent a shaker sieve with three different inserts, each varying in hole size for fossicking, so we took that along and had a good time in the river searching for gems!  We never found anything real large, but you can't hardly sieve a scoop without finding some small garnets throughout.  Treasure hunting is fairly addicting...



We came home on Monday afternoon, very happy to return to toilets, showers, and air conditioning, but missing our starry nights, campfire meals, and free days!  It's nice to know we can do the dry camping, but I prefer the camping where the facilities are built in and there are paths to ride bikes on and a lake or river to cool off in...those are the days dreams are made of.

Thanks for tuning in,
Love,
Hilary  

Junction Waterhole and Chamber's Pillar

There is another waterhole we discovered not too far from town called Junction Waterhole.  One Saturday morning we made our way north to have a look!  It is reached by a 4x4 track off the main highway, a bit of driving in a sandy creekbed, and a few guesses and backtracks.  There are tire tracks from other people out there, so we eventually found it by following the best followed trails and Trent's printed satellite images of the area.  Junction Waterhole is so named because it is where two rivers meet and create a waterhole in the wetter times of year.  There are big grassy benches of land on the sides of the rivers dotted with huge gum trees.  We found a rope swing that people must fly off into the water from, but the kids liked it even with dry sand below!  There are various places on the trail with fun climbing rocks, so it was a pretty fun place to explore.

Jax swinging it up at Junction Waterhole

Beaux on the swing

Jones was terrified, but I caught one smile!

We actually tried to find the waterhole first on the night before.  Friday night (still pizza night even in Australia) we grabbed some pizza and headed out to have a picnic.  Our hunger won the day before we could find Junction Waterhole, so we pulled off into the bush near a big flat rock, had our pizza picnic on it, watched the beautiful Australian sunset and then headed home.



A few weeks later, we were in the Disco again tooling south to visit Chamber's Pillar, a natural rock pillar that was used historically to mark the way for travelers and pioneers to the area. 





The pillar is a few hours drive away and the track was horribly corrugated...probably the worst we've encountered so far here in Central Australia.  We were bumped and jostled until we thought we'd fall apart, so it was quite a relief to arrive. 





Chamber's Pillar has a campground and several pit toilets as far as amenities go, and a nice walking trail around the pillar and some scaffolding and metal railings up to the base of the vertical rock part.  There are hundreds of names carved into the stone; some are historically significant and some "vandalism."  I suppose even the vandals will be historic at some point in the future...We did not carve ours in, of course.

There are also some aboriginal carvings in the rocks thereabouts that was fun to see too.  

There was another rock formation close by called Castle Rock.  When viewed from a certain angle it looks like a huge stone castle with towers and battlements. 







We walked around it as well, and even surprised a kangaroo on the back side.  We got to watch it leap and bound all the way down until it disappeared into the bush and rocks below. 

We stayed long enough to catch the sun setting and reflecting red off the rocks before starting off on the torturous ride home.  The track is awful, but the campground seemed full (there were maybe 6 or 8 spots) so it must be a popular destination.  We had brought a cooler (called Esky here) with sandwiches and such, so had a light dinner on the fly.  It really is a lovely time of year here...the wildflowers are blooming everywhere.  They don't survive in the hot, hot summers, so it is nice to see so much color:  purples, white and yellow, bright reds and oranges.  It was a long trek for a little adventure, but now we've been there, done that!

Stay tuned for more...coming soon!
Hilary