I visited my good friend Gary in the “down under” during the spring of 2004. Gary is an old college buddy from Humboldt State College in Eureka, California. He got a degree in Natural Resources from Humboldt State, then a Masters degree in the same subject from the University of Nevada, Reno. Unfortunately, getting a masters degree didn’t translate into getting a job, so he took his family and moved to Australia. He found a government job that took him far out into the “outback” for months at a time, over a period of many years. As a result, he has become one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on this little known and little visited part of the world.
Gary called me over to go on a bird watching trip with him. He has one of those incredible, photographic memories and a great interest in birds. He takes very long traveling surveys of the interior every five years or so making an inventory of the types, numbers and locations of the birds. I was lucky enough to get invited to join him on this trip. Our trip was scheduled to be for about a month in the heart of the country – the great desert roughly centered on the city of Alice Springs.
On one of our excursions we headed south-east from Alice Springs, along the ridges of the Macdonnel Ranges. I am not positive how far we drove, or exactly where we ended up – all that I recall is that it was a very long drive down a dirt road in the Simpson Desert. Our goal was a camp ground in a wash a hundred or so miles from Alice Springs. Gary knew that there were birds to be found, and a lot of ancient petroglyphs. Gary likes birds; we both like petroglyphs, and they were all in the middle of the wonderful desert, we had the best of all worlds.
We arrived at the campground in the late afternoon, tired after a long day’s dusty driving and ready for a nice cold beer. As we sat and drank our beer, we noticed that another car was in the camp ground which rather surprised me because of its remoteness. There was a nice hike up the dry creek bed where you could see the countryside, and find petroglyphs engraved into the rocks along the side of the path. We decided to take the hike but found very few petroglyphs. There were a few scattered along the trail, but hardly the profusion of rock art promised by the sign in the camp ground. It was a nice enough walk, but not a great rock art find. Along the trail we met the other folks, who appeared to be equally less than impressed.
When we got to the end of the creek, the canyon became a box canyon where the trail ended. The petroglyphs at this location were worth the hike. There was an amazing pair of human figures sporting extremely long hair radiating out like a wild Einstein. They are in the photo included in this story. The figures were small, maybe six inches tall, with “hair” (or whatever it represents) at least double the size of the figure. While these figures appear pretty tame in the photo, in real life they made MY hair stand on end. I have seen thousands of petroglyphs in my life, but these two are the most powerful and full of spirit that I have encountered. I felt that they were more than mere drawings; it seemed that they were actually the carriers of the powers that they represented. I felt like some people might feel when they are in the presence of the Pope, or upon entering a splendid cathedral. They literally took my breath away and made me want to fall to my knees in worship. I didn’t do that for fear of looking silly, but maybe I should have. To me, we were obviously in a place of great power and great spiritual importance. I also felt that the “hair” didn’t represent hair at all, it was energy emanating from the figures. Both Gary and I became pretty subdued as we walked back down the canyon to our camp.
When we got back to our camp, we found that the other car had gone and we were once more all alone in the middle of the most incredible country that I have ever encountered. When you are all alone out there, you are REALLY all alone.
We gathered fire wood and started a small fire to cook our steaks and potatoes (steaks put directly on the burning coals, potatoes snuggled down into the coals to cook). The sunset that night was amazing. The sky was ablaze with bright reds and yellows, lighting up the thin clouds drifting in front of the deep blue sky. As the light show in the sky died down, darkness came quite quickly.
We were sitting next to the fire chatting, watching the coals, and enjoying our dinner when Gary jumped up excitedly and starting pointing at a yellow light that appeared to be dancing in the trees a couple of a hundred yards away. He said that it was a Min Min light and that it was the first that he had seen. Apparently, this part of the Simpson Desert is famous for these mysterious lights.
As we watched the light, it broke up into several lights that danced and flew slowly among the trees, and up the wash toward the energy headed petroglyphs. They went along the ground, and then would sail up high into the trees. Bobbing, floating as they joined together and slit apart. We took our flashlights to follow them up the canyon to see what we might find, but when we walked toward them they went out. There was nothing to see. When we went back to camp, they started again – and finally just sort of faded away. I don’t know how long this show went on, but it might have been an hour or more. Gary said that the old aborigines consider the lights to be benign to watch, but dangerous to approach.
In the morning I decided to walk in the general direction of where they were coming from to see if I could learn anything more. As I walked across the rocky and brush filled creek bed I suddenly realized that someone was camped in the creek bed! Someone had apparently been there to see (or maybe make?) the show. I started to go over to talk to them, but was rather mysteriously stopped in my tracks. I just couldn’t go any more in that direction, it felt like I was not welcome and that whoever was there intended to be out in the desert alone. I never even got close enough to tell anything about them. I couldn’t tell if they were male or female, white or aborigine. It seemed like it was just one person, but I am not even sure about that. I told Gary that there was a person over there. Maybe they had a small camp, but there was no tent, fire or anything else “camp like” – just a person sitting next to a tree. Gary expressed no interest at all, he didn’t seem to have any inclination to go visit (which is unusual for him because he is quite gregarious). Gary’s response seemed to agree with my feelings, so we just left the person alone. He told me that sometimes the old ones go to places like that, and if so they should be left alone.
We decided to take another walk up the canyon to see if we could find more petroglyphs. About a third of the way up the creek we took a side creek into a steep and very rugged canyon. What a site it turned out to be! There were thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of petroglyphs. Almost every rock had art on it, and many had dozens of drawings. The canyon was filled to the brim with art of a wildly extravagant and amazing variety.
We hiked far up the canyon which also turned into a box canyon. We decided to climb out of the canyon, which seemed simple enough because by then it had become smooth sided with gentle slopes. We started up the right hand wall to get to the top of the bluff, and as we continued the climbing kept getting steeper and harder. The solid rock started to get crumbly, and I began to worry about slipping into the by now deep gorge. It became clear that we had gotten in a bit over our heads with this climb. A false step could start a slide toward a cliff below us, the rock was too slippery and steep to go back down, and the climbing kept getting harder as we went up. With great relief we finally made it to the top, where it was flat and easy walking through an area covered with Spinifex plants, with their long needle-like leaves that easily puncture through the sides of boots and pants if you were careless enough to brush against it.
The relief of getting to the top was short lived once I realized that we had been concentrating so hard on getting up the cliff that we had neglected to keep track of direction. We found ourselves on top of a wide plain, with no signs of recognizable landmarks. We wandered around for awhile and finally spotted a dry creek, which we assumed was the one we were camping in. I decided that if we could find a way down off of the mesa, we could walk back up the creek and hopefully find our camp. All of this was of course to be done without water because we had planned on just a few minutes of an easy walk up the canyon, but got lead from petroglyph to petroglyph and finally up the side of the cliff. I was getting thirsty, but couldn’t do much about it at this point.
We hiked for a long time on top looking for a way back down. We finally found a winding, and very steep, trail down and eventually came to the creek bed. We walked around the first bush that we came to – directly into our camp! We ended up returning within a hundred feet or so of our camp – heading right toward it. We both just looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders – mysterious things happen in that desert.