The salt lake sleep out…
FRIDAY FROM THE ARCHIVE
It's a nine-shooter night, lying out on the hard crust of a salt lake somewhere in the arid back country of South Australia.
The land is utterly silent. The stars are brilliant and shot through with streaks of meteor. Around our makeshift camp stretches a twinkling crust of salt. We sit ensconced in our sleeping bags, waiting for the next shooting star. The thrill of being in such a strange and curious place makes Craig declare: "When I grow up I want to be an explorer."
This sleep-out is good training, then, because it is in the heart of explorer country. The hard open expanse of Australia's desert outback, riddled with the historic tracks of Giles, Stuart, Eyre, Sturt. And for us, it throws up some unexpected and intriguing discoveries.
The idea is to have a simple adventure in one night - to break the boredom of a road trip. After passing multiple salt lakes Craig suggests it would be fun to sleep on one and it certainly sounds better than camping at another toilet-paper infested road-side rest area. So, off we go and find ourselves a salt lake.
After an early dinner by the car, looking out across our chosen location, we throw a basic kit together - tarp, sleeping bags, cooker, tea and coffee. The salt lake we select is not the biggest in the area but its flatness, the uniformity of the white surface, the glaring light, all play tricks with distance and perception. The far shore looks closer than it turns out to be. And, there is water out there too. We can see a thin line in the distance where the hard salt finishes and a reflection of the cloud speckled sky begins. We hoist our packs onto our shoulders and head for where the world merges into that disorientating mess of white and light.
As we set off it reminds me of a routine we had when living in Coffs Harbour and holding down regular Monday-Friday, 9-5 jobs. Once a month we would embark on what we called our 'break-up-the-week-bivy'. We would leave work and grab our backpacks, cooker, pots, an easy dinner to reheat, and our sleeping bags and bivy bags. We would throw a clean set of work clothes in the car for the next day and then drive off and find somewhere quiet, remote, in nature, to sleep the night. Our criteria was a place no more than a 45 minute commute to work the next day. We never walked far, sometimes just 500m, but always away from people and houses. Some call it stealth camping.
We ended up on local beach headlands, on tiny patches of gravel beside rainforest streams with glow worms as bedside lights, on sandstone cliff tops and in the sand dunes amongst spinifex and banksia. Anything, anywhere, to bring nature back into our lives on an otherwise workaday week. What a feeling and freedom it was - having a morning brew in the bush as the sun rose, eating breakfast in the forest or looking out sea before a day in an otherwise abundantly manufactured world.
Walking out across our salt lake for the night, there is a similar sense of anticipation.
There are also unexpected charms. The surface of the lake is a hard, crunchy layer of jagged, crystallised salt set in angular patterns and squares. Encrusted upon its surface are poor sticks and shrubs blown onto the lake and now cemented to its surface. We head towards the distant water which proves to be a forty minute walk away. When we get there we choose a sleeping spot a good distance back from the edge before Craig continues across the lake to take evening photos of this remarkable landscape. It is like he walks out onto a mirror.
But, in the flat, featureless refrain of dusk, finding his way back proves to be his first explorer’s challenge. With nothing burning bright on the horizon, and no landmarks or features to follow, distance and direction are blurred. Night falls like a sudden turning off of the world. Craig becomes invisible to me and I to him. I turn on my head torch and wave it in bright arcs above my head. After ten minutes, his silhouette becomes vaguely visible. I keep the light burning, guiding him in like a lighthouse would.
After watching for meteors, we finally fall asleep beneath the beautifully starry sky. An hour before dawn, I wake to find a crescent moon has risen. It appears to be flickering and glimmering right beside my head but in the blurred confusion between slumber and wakefulness I can make no sense of it all and fall back to sleep. Half an hour later I rouse fully and realise the tide has come in. A shallow sheet of water surrounds us.
We scurry about, quickly packing away our sleeping bags and grabbing our meagre equipment, now damp with the encroaching salty water. The lake has us surrounded. It is about a centimetre deep. It does not take long to walk to the water's edge and back onto a hard salt surface. Had we camped just twenty metres away, the water would not have reached us until after dawn. But, it is definitely still rising and creeping across the lake's surface at about ten metres every ten minutes - chasing us as we begin walking back to shore.
Where did it come from? No idea. Despite my online research efforts I have not managed to find a suitable explanation for our rising 'tide'. Data on Australian salt lakes is as sparse as the lake's themselves. Nearly all salt lakes occur in arid or semi-arid zones. All are ephemeral. Some are pink. Generally, the bed of a salt lake is made up of gypsiferous muds, clays and silts with some gypsum crystals. A layer of salt crust, from 30 mm to 75 mm thick can cover this. On the large and famous Lake Gairdner in South Australia, this crust ranges in thickness from a few centimetres to over one metre, forming a surface suitable for motor sport and land speed records.
At our lake, by lunch time, the water has receded again and the surface is once more hard packed salt under a brittle blue sky, ready for the next explorer.
This story first appeared on awildland.blogspot.com.au on Thursday 13 August 2015. Stay tuned for a collection of salt lake images from Craig.
