“Hell of a place for a flat Horse.” I said. Physically shaking against the bitter squall on Pebbly Range Road. We had been riding west into the grim, a distant low cloud over a furrowed landscape and my equally furrowed brow. He was fumbling for tools in the cold, all I could really do was wait.
For the next few hours everything was useless. The frustration of frozen fingers, wet maps and electronics. With little option we pushed on into stinking sticky red mud. It took us six hours to cover fifty clicks that day and another to reach Adelaide.
The tour… over.
Postscript
Riding the Mawson was an epic ‘fail’.
We only covered a fifth of the planned trail. But this wasn’t of our own volition, things conspired against us from the outset; delayed flights, lost bikes with the inevitable lost days. But for all it’s frustrations we made the most of what we had, and took from it useful lessons and memorable experiences.
For me it wasn’t until we crossed that threshold from rolling green pasture to the expansive red country beyond that I truely felt I had arrived. It was there that I wanted to go, and it was there that we left the relative known of the Mawson for a land unknown.
Reflecting, I now see it more as reconnoitre than ramble. We were prospectors, surveying the terrain for a future time, a future campaign.
Does that mean I will be going back? Yes and I wonder when that will be…
Todays top track: Gundungurra – Keep on moving