The Larapinta Trail by John Borthwick

If King Neptune had worn ripple-sole shoes, his footprint in the sand might look like this. I’m looking at a 350-million year old slab of rock that’s grooved in even, parallel rows, much like (I imagine) a mythologically large ripple-sole might make. The slab, some sixty centimetres by thirty, solidified eons ago from sand ripples on an ancient ocean’s shoreline. Today it sits atop the West MacDonnell Ranges, 1000 metres above sea level, with the closest ocean that might have shaped it now some 1300 kilometres distant.

“It’s known as ‘ripple-mark’ rock,” says Hamid, a geologist with whom I’m trekking the Larapinta Trail. We’re on day two of a three-day desert tramp through the West MacDonnell National Park, about 100 kilometres west of Alice Springs. Hamid’s an excellent companion because what are to me just rocks and boulders he soon specifies as quartzite, diorite and granite.

A colour consultant mightn’t be a bad trekking companion either, since the landscape has so many shades of ochre, salmon, red and umber that they defy naming. “Paprika rocks? Or, how about ‘cream of capsicum soup’ cliffs?” proposes Jenny, a botanist and the younger of our two trekking guides. Her culinary similes are as good as any in trying to approximate the tones of this stark, vast, stony, silent landscape that, when seen from our high ridge, stretches from horizon to horizon beneath a deeply-hued blue sky.

We walk on, keeping up an easy pace, keeping up the water intake, too, heading west towards Counts Point ridge. Here, our lead guide Adrian calls a halt and we suck on oranges while taking in distant Mt Sonder, a mauve massif that resembles a reclining pregnant woman. Adrian points out nearby Gosse Bluff, formed when a huge comet whacked into the earth — the biggest event around here in the last 130 million years.

Spinifex, cycads, gibbers, skinks, kites and cockatoos – these, and our own footfalls, are the constants as we traverse the Larapinta Trail. This chain of day-walks along the ranges can be done in single sections or linked together as a challenging 230-kilometre epic. Our excursion is at the moderate end of the scale, but striding past us comes a lanky young German, Thomas who’s doing the full trek.

“I asked myself, ’What should I do?’” he tells us. “Get a job or take a nice 14-day hike? Easy — I can always work later.” He lopes off, the incarnation of a happy wanderer.

Our journey, organised by World Expeditions, consists of five walks, ranging from four to sixteen kilometres. We camp in a mulga clearing near the ruins of Serpentine Chalet, a quixotic, 1950’s Ansett-Pioneer tourist venture. The “chalet,” not far from Serpentine Gorge, was once the mid-point on an all-day, bun-busting excursion from Alice to Ormiston Gorge, as endured by visitors in old WW II-surplus Blitz wagons. Given its remoteness on an unsealed road, it’s not surprising that the chalet went broke within a decade. All that now remains is a concrete slab, plus a white-fellers’ midden of fibro and rusted fuel drums. These days, on the sealed highway that now zips by here, it takes little more than 90 minutes to reach Ormiston Gorge.

For the eight of us in the group, plus our two guides, the journey started with a two-hour “shake-down” walk from Alice Springs to the Geoff Moss Bridge on the bone-dry Charles River. Jenny the guide tells me, “Geoff Moss was a Minister for Public Works and, I think, the father of some rock guitarist called Ian Moss.” You know you’re getting really old when twenty-somethings don’t even know the name of the “other” – and possibly better — singer in Cold Chisel.

We pile into a Land Cruiser and head west to Standley Chasm in the Chewings Range, still part of the “West Macs.” Next comes a four-kilometre loop walk. We climb staircases of shattered basalt that are over-hung by silver-trunked ghost gums before beginning the return down the narrow, dry watercourse of Standley Chasm. This clambering descent is fun for some of us, and “a challenge” for a couple of acrophobes. We have to wiggle through a keyhole gap, inch down a notched log, then bum-slide over boulders that have been worn smooth by countless wet season cataracts. Reaching the narrow cleft of the chasm, what we find flowing through it is not water but a coach load of excited, big-blinged Italian tourists from Melbourne.

We overnight at our camp near Serpentine Chalet, sleeping in the open in canvas swags. Tents are an option but no way will I miss the chance to snore at the dead centre of the continent beneath a snow-dome of stars. Nevertheless, I have to keep the swag flap pulled over my head, such is the floodlight intensity of the full moon. The morning is near freezing but, as they to say, you wouldn’t be dead for quids.

Day two is the long one: Section Eight of the Larapinta Trail, some 16 kilometres. The Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Service has marked the track well and installed water tanks at the trailheads, but there’s no water up in the high desert hills. We’re each carrying three litres in our daypacks, just enough to make it through a day that grows hotter and hotter.

We hoof it across rocks so old that they pre-date vertebrate creatures on Earth, reaching the top of a high ridge that allows us a panorama of the Heavitree and Chewings ranges as they run, green, ochre and shadow-buttressed towards infinity. “Pull up a soft rock. Let’s have a break,” says Adrian. A long valley dips between our ridge and its neighbour, a dramatic rise topped by a conga-line of camel humps and dragon spines. In fact, these ridges and troughs, running parallel, resemble nothing so much as giant swells on an inland ocean. Perhaps that ripple tread I saw wasn’t Neptune’s, but the old sandal of Kahuna, god of the surf.

The earth’s palette and patterns here are pure Fred Williams or Albert Namatjira, or both. Not surprising since, as we peer through binoculars, far to the north we can make out the roofs and solar panels of the place where Albert once lived and painted, the Hermannsburg Mission, established by Lutheran priests in 1877.

The sky is an intense and perfect blue, but the descent, from the summit’s breezes into microwave heat, is arduous. We’re walking in the valley of the shadow of absolutely nothing. The trail’s one-kilometre marker posts seem to stretch ever more apart. Then, finally, near dusk – our camp. Rest and rehydration. A fine mulga wood fire. Salad and scrumptious fish for dinner.

“Lara pinta,” the Arrernte Aboriginal term for Central Australia’s Finke River, means “brackish water.” The name was applied to this string of popular walks, although the Larapinta Trail as such is not a traditional Aboriginal route. In 2002, Parks and Wildlife linked, upgraded and signposted the 12 sections of the trail. Between April and September each year, hundreds of hikers now enjoy the various treks, either with professional tour operators, or as well-equipped and fit solo walkers like Thomas.

After a warmer night, we breakfast on coffee and crumpets, then check out the nearby dam that fed Serpentine Chalet in its hey-day — if indeed it had one. At the head of a rugged valley we find cliffs that form a chasm through which water flows in the wet season. Incongruously, right across the narrow valley is a thick concrete dam, some 12 metres wide by about three metres high. Someone, or ones, had laboured unimaginably, lugging hundreds of tonnes of cement and sand up the boulder-clotted riverbed – no vehicle could penetrate here even today – to then mix and pour this massive wall. The only hint of its heroic constructors is indented lettering on the dam face: “R Livio” and “Tessarya.”

We do two shorter treks on our last day, from Serpentine Chalet to Inarlunga Pass, and then a loop stroll at Ormiston Gorge. More sapphire skies frame ghost gums and the quartzite orange cliffs. More cross-country, up-hill, down-dale striding, but by now we are all much fitter and the walking is easier.

In ambulans solvitur — “in walking it is solved.” Between that ultra-violet sky and the spinifex earth with its rippled rocks, the person you meet on the trail is mostly yourself. The rhythm of paces works a mesmeric spell. When not nattering with each other, we drift into our own thoughts, perhaps resolving some of the petty questions of our distant, daily lives.

My walking daydream ends spectacularly when we round a bend at Inarlunga Pass and see the spectrum of the famous Ochre Pits. Vertical striations in sulphur yellow, chalk white, burnt umber, deep orange and almost mulberry red are banded down the face of a 50-metre long cliff. Aboriginal traders dug these colours, highly valued for ceremonial decorations, and exchanged them for other goods along ancient trade routes that ran as far north and south as the oceans.

Our last trek, the Ormiston Gorge loop is equally spectacular, ending beside a string of deep pools whose windless waters reflect every detail of the bright ochre cliffs above them. From a tiny ledge up there, a grey rock wallaby observes our arrival and then departure back to our place, like its own, in the scheme of things.

Footnote: One of our group, Barry, fit-as-a-fiddle, legs it easily through our 30-kilometre wilderness hike, only to come a cropper on the last day plus one. He wasn’t boulder–hopping through a washout gully but stepping, perfectly sober, over an Alice Springs gutter. I last see him sporting a nicely sprained ankle and propped in a wheelchair, contemplating not Neptune or Kahuna but the gods of irony.