At The Farm: Trephina Gorge Camping trip

A few weeks ago we had a few days off. We packed up the car and drove off into the East MacDonald Ranges straight after work at 5pm. The East Macs are not as popular with tourists and so are a bit quieter but equally beautiful.

We were heading for Trephina Gorge which is about 80 kms from Alice. The road was quiet and we saw very little traffic. The birds however were all out and about and had very little road sense. We have never had so many birds fly out in front of us and unfortunately I think we probably hit about 15-20 little fellas. There was a huge variety of suicidal birds, like budgies, diamond doves, zebra finches and crested pigeons.

There are 3 camp sites at Trephina and I had decided to spend our first night at John Hayes rock hole. There was a dirt road off the highway and then a 4wd track to the rock hole. One of the vets at work had mentioned that the track was quite rough and she was right. This was the roughest track we have been on so far and was a combination of huge rocks, logs, holes, mud sand etc. So it took us quite a while to get to the camp site. When we did arrive just on dusk we found a very sad, rocky site with little there to recommend it. You are near a waterhole but you can’t see it and there is just a lot of rock about, a lot.

We set up though and cooked up our 900 gram T-bone steak that we bought from Milner Meats in Alice. A beautiful grass fed wopper of a steak. In the end we had to dissect it from the bone and cut it in half a few times so we could cook it. Delicious.