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andoland · 30-09-2015, 09:50 AM

We saw lots of dingo prints in the wheel tracks each morning and saw a few along the way. Just after Purni bore, after we�d been following dingo tracks all morning, we came over a dune to find a dingo standing on the track. It turned and looked at us, stopped and lay down in the middle of the track which let us all get some good photos. It only got up and moved when we started driving again.

We got to Dalhousie Springs and of course had a lovely bath in the hot springs. As we pulled into the camping area the volunteer fellow who was looking after the campground came over. After checking we had permit and where we wanted to camp I mentioned we were heading further up to the Madigan Line. It turns out he was Rob (I think) Correa who was on the expedition with Dave Olsen 1994 when they put in the star pickets and plaques at each camp. What an amazing coincidence! A bit later on we had another brief chat with Rob and his wife Pam (I think, and apologies to them both if I have their names wrong). They warned us about carrying too much on our roofs due to how rough the country is. Rob also explained why there is a Camp 1A � Camp 1 is on private property and while the owners don�t prohibit people going there they would prefer you not to, so Rob and Dave Olsen put in Camp 1A as well.

The next day we passed through Mt Dare, fuelling up while there, and made our way to Mac Clarke Conservation Reserve where we camped for the night. When we got to Mt Dare they had signs up saying their eftpos wasn�t working, they told us it was only working intermittently, and it did actually work for us but it indicates the importance of carrying cash with you on these trips because you can�t count on being able to use your plastic. We stopped briefly at Old Andado homestead for a look but we�d been there before so didn�t spend much time. Mac Clarke is a conservation area set up to preserve the very rare Acacia Peuce trees which apparently only occur in this small area and in another location near Birdsville.

Mac Clarke wasn�t a great campsite being very exposed and no firewood, but we had picked some up earlier so could have a fire. We got some light spits of rain early in the evening, not enough to move out of your chair for, but we did all set up tarps over our swags but in the end there was not enough over night to worry about.

Camping at Mac Clarke

Boys and their toys

The next day we headed off for the first of the Madigan camps and The Twins. We were intending to go to Camp 1 but missed the track and found ourselves heading to Camp 1A. Given the land owners preference for people to not visit Camp 1 we didn�t make any effort to back track and pick up the track. After Camp 2 we climbed (well walked, they�re not very big) the northern hill and checked out the cairn, plaque and tin box with notes from various people who had passed through.
Camp 1A (not really a Madigan camp but it still felt like the start of the real trip)

View from "The Twins" looking south

andoland · 30-09-2015, 09:54 AM

Up until now we had been following very clear tracks but it was about to get harder. Leaving The Twins there were a couple of tracks, one leading to the aboriginal community and camps 3, 4 and 5 for which we didn�t have a permit to visit and the other which we expected to head off in the direction of Camp 6 via The Pivot and The Crossing and therefore bypassing the aboriginal land. Following what we thought was this second track, after a few km�s found ourselves heading east and slightly north, initially in the direction of Camp 3, not south east as we expected. The track we were following was well defined and had had recent traffic. Part of the group continued to follow this track for a few more km�s to see where it went and it seemed to head east, possibly intersecting the track we wanted to be on somewhere between The Crossing and Camp 6 but we couldn�t be sure. We�d also heard there had been some survey exploration tracks put in around this area in recent times so weren�t sure if this was just leading to one of those. One of our vehicles backtracked to see if they could find a track heading where we thought we should be going and after a while they came across a faint track so the decision was made to head that way. It was a very faint track and often the lead car had to stop and go out on foot to pick up the track again.

Campsite somewhere between The Twins and the Hale River

This started a small dilemma that we had for the next couple of days. In preparation for the trip the few reports we could find said that were faint tracks in places but for very long stretches there was no track to follow and so we had fully expected to be going cross country for much of the trip. However, we still found ourselves in these first couple of days spending time and effort trying to find a track to follow even though we didn�t need one and expected not to find one.

While the track was initially pretty good after The Pivot it became very rough and this was to be the way for the next 8 days. That afternoon we stopped at a beautiful campsite on one of the arms of the dry Hale River. We covered 84km this day.

Typical dunes and swales around this area

The next day things got interesting. We started out following a faint track and after a little while were contacted on the radio by another vehicle claiming to be on the Madigan Line be heading west. They gave us some directions for how to get on the track after crossing a shot line, but we couldn�t work out if that was one we�d already passed or one that lay ahead of us. For some reason they wouldn�t tell us where they were so we could work out where their track might be. We continued on, wondering if we would find their track at some point.

After 8 or 10km the faint track we�d been following suddenly turned south east when we expected to be heading north east. We spent some time looking for another track and trying to decide what to do. Out theory was that at this point most people must head across to the Colson Track then follow it northwards until level with Camp 6 and then head back across the dunes to Camp 6. After some deliberation we decided to leave the track and head north east directly to Camp 6. It was quite thrilling to now be making our own track, but boy did it get hard and slow from here. We headed northwards in the dune swale for as long as we could before finding a place to cross. The Nissan Patrol was in the lead and did a great job picking out a pathway though the vegetation and over the dunes. From this point the process for the lead vehicle was get to the top of a dune, stop and check the way down and pick a point on the next dune to aim for. If you didn�t do this it was easy to lose your direction in the swale while trying to go around trees and sticks and holes and lumps and you�d find yourself in a different spot to where you thought you were going.

The Nissan�s progress over the dunes was not easy but easier than I expected, but not so easy for the following vehicles. A lot of the time there seemed to be a bit of a crust on the sand and the lead vehicle would go over this but break it up for the following vehicles.

Up until now I�d ben running 20psi in my tyres which seemed to be fine, plus I was fearful of punctures. But I was starting to struggle over the top of some dunes and after getting stuck on one (in my defence there was a little bush at the top with a mound of sand and when I stopped to check over the dune I didn�t realize I�d stopped against this bush) and needing to be snatched back down I let them down to 18 psi. This was better but I was still struggling on some dunes. There was one where the track taken by the Nissan was going at an angle close to the top of the dune and when I go to this part the sand would start to move causing us to slide a little sideways. I reversed a tried a few more times but couldn�t get through this soft section so we picked a new line over this dune. I lost one rear mudflap on one of my attempts on this dune � luckily one of the following vehicles saw it and picked it up. I lost my second mudflap later in the day but also was able to find that one. They spent the rest of the trip occy strapped to the BT50�s roof rack. From here I let my tyres down to 15 psi and that�s where they stayed until Birdsville and I had no more trouble on dunes. All the vehicles had multiple attempts at some dunes today. It was really hard to get momentum up due to the lumpy ground and you end up stopping in the soft sand at the top of the dune.

Driving through the swales was an exercise in dodging trees and roots all the while waiting for a staked tyre. It had to happen eventually and when the Nissan stopped on top of a dune to look at the path ahead they heard the hiss of escaping air and found a pencil sized stake through a rear tyre. It was a good time for morning tea while he plugged the tyre and then we were on our way. Amazingly this was our only puncture of the whole trip!

Eventually we came to the Colson Track. The lead vehicle did a short recce up the track to look for signs of wheel tracks heading in the direction of camp 6 but there were none so we continued cross country. That night we camped a few km to the east of the Colson Track, having covered just 33km in 6 � hours. We were starting to think this trip was going to be as tough as we had imagined.

The Nissan on the Colson Track

The next day (day 4 on the Madigan Line from Dalhousie) was my turn as lead vehicle. I picked up a faint track after the campsite but lost it soon after so now it was my turn to pick the way through swales and over dunes. Following a track like this wasn�t really much easier on the vehicles but the benefit I found was it took away the need to make a decision about where to cross every dune and then pick out a path to that point. The sun being just above the dunes and us heading east/north east made it very tough for the first hour and I found myself having to stop every 50-100 metres or so and get out of the vehicle to pick out a line or a place to cross the dunes because of the shadows and glare. Again it was slow � low range 2nd gear doing 7-10 kph bumping over moguls and around trees and bushes. Mostly the vegetation was sparse � fires through here a couple of years ago had decimated it � but there were plenty of burnt shrubs and stakes and roots to find away around. We were picking up plenty of scratches on the duco by this stage. I picked up a very, very faint track at one point which I was able to follow through a densely vegetated area with thick, tall trees. It was clear that no-one had used this track for a couple of years due to the tall shrubs in the middle of the track in some places. After a few dunes this track disappeared and I was picking my own line again.

Going cross country.

Then suddenly, a few km�s before Camp 6, we came across very fresh wheel tracks coming from (or perhaps heading to) the west. They appeared to be from a single vehicle only so may have been from the people we spoke to on the radio the previous day. We followed these tracks to Camp 6 where we found well defined vehicle tracks coming in from several places. We surmised that, as I mentioned previously, most people head up the Colson track and then head across to Camp 6 once they are far enough north. We also suspect (but don�t have any evidence) that some groups must come in from Camp 5. It would have been interested to head up the Colson track to find where these tracks originate.
From Camp 6 the track was well defined, although not well worn, and we wouldn�t have to go cross country again for the rest of the trip. We continued on and camped between camps 7 and 8 and covered a total of 64km. Had the wheel tracks from Camp 6 not been so well defined the going would have been far slower. We also followed camel footprints for probably 30km today from what appeared to be a group of three camels � one large set of prints, one medium set and one small set � but didn�t see any camels.

Camp 6

Wheel tracks from Camp 6

Camping under the full moon

andoland · 30-09-2015, 10:03 AM

The next day we covered 58km and camped between Camps 11 and 12 on a claypan with a large stand of Gidgee � it was a beautiful campsite and in hindsight we wished we had spent another night there. The track was well defined all day and the sand was incredibly red. The kids were calculating the height of the dunes by watching the altitude on the GPS and the highest one today was 26m. This was higher than the vehicle crossing of Big Red when we measured it on our way back into Birdsville. At the start of the day the vegetation in the swales was sparse and had been burnt out by fire. Then it greened up and we started into very dense spinifex which went on for many km until suddenly we crested a dune and the vegetation was barely there again. There were lots of big dunes today with many of them quite soft at the top and we could see run-up tracks on the eastern side where the single vehicle heading west to east had to have several attempts and some run to get over.

Camp 8. You can see that sometimes Madigan just had to camp wherever he got to at the end of the day, although 74 years ago there could have been good feed here.

In places where the spinifex had been burnt out there were new spinifex plants starting out life

Campsite in Gidgee stand

Day 6 was pretty similar to the previous day although the dunes were not big. Again the going was slow and bumpy � it took a lot of concentration to maintain a speed that didn�t have suspension bottoming out on the bump stops all the time. This is no place to break something! This meant mostly 1st gear travel and resisting the temptation to change up into 2nd gear if the track smoothed out because this usually only lasted for a few tens of metres, or occasionally for a couple of hundred metres. We had intended to camp before Camp 14 but the �good campsite� noted in the guidebook turned out to be bare. We ended up camping about 0.5km short of Camp 15 because it was the first place we could find decent timber.

We were using a book called The Outback Travellers Track Guide � North Simpson Desert from which most of the information came from Ian Stabler. It basically shows a track that goes to every one of the camps, has coordinates for each of the camps as well as places of interest along the way, notes the height of significant dunes, etc. We were roughly trying to stick to the route outlined in this book. We were beginning to discover though, how much the desert can change with a few good years or a good fire. In places Ian�s track notes (which were pre-2007 when he passed away) noted good camp sites showing pictures of good vegetation and firewood but we would often find these completely desolate so we learned not to trust them too much.

Camp 12 marker - there are even imbeciles out here

Another camp under the bright moon

The next day we camped at Camp 17 where there was plenty of gidgee. We stopped at Madigans blaze tree for photos but again we�d all been here before on the Hay River trip. We had another demonstration of how much the country side had changed after a couple of good wet seasons. In this area the Hay River track passes right by the start (or end) of a brilliant red dune and four years ago this dune was bare. This time we were nearly past it before I recognized it as there are now 2-3m tall trees and other shrubs growing on and around the end of this dune.

Madigans Blaze Tree at Camp 16

andoland · 30-09-2015, 10:06 AM

Day 8 was a rest day. We were able to listed to the mighty Maroons smash the cockroaches in the 2nd state of origin. My daughter and I cooked a damper and my 8 year old son also lost his left thong here so he was stuck with wearing boots for the rest of the trip. If anyone sees a left Spiderman thong at Camp 17 please let me know ☺

Camp 17

The following day was a short day and we were in camp by 12:30, approximately half way between Camp 18 and 19. It was a nice drive through the swales today, we saw a solitary camel and camped in a stand of gidgee again. This section was through the Simpson Desert National Park which we had permission to traverse. We had read that the dunes became very high again through here and we thought that there may not be as many people through this way, with most opting to head out via the Hay River track, so thought the going might get tough again. However, it was much like the previous days and very enjoyable.

Day 10 saw us enter Adria Downs station, which we also had permission to traverse. The highlight here was seeing 4 or 5 herds of wild horses running through the dunes, no doubt startled by our vehicles coming through. One small group of 5 or 6 horses ran along the track in front of the lead vehicle for several hundred metres, proving quite a spectacle. We stopped at Camps 19, 20, 21 and 22. We spent some time at the Anandale homestead ruins marveling at how tough it must have been for people in the old days. This homestead was abandoned in 1939 when Madigan passed through and it was interesting to compare what is there now to the photos in his book.

Vermin Proof Fence

Waterhole at Camp 20

Annandale Homestead Ruins

andoland · 30-09-2015, 10:09 AM

Childrens graves near homestead

Old boring plant complete with boiler. What an effort it would have been to drag it all the way out here 100 years ago.

Camp 22 - the last one for us

It really felt like the trip was coming to and end now as we were out of the rough tracks onto station tracks and seeing cattle everywhere. We covered 110km this day.

We camped on Eyre Creek where the bypass track comes out of the dunes and just north of the bypass crossing, as we did not have permission to access Madigan�s camps 23 and 24. We had camped in this exact spot 4 years earlier when Eyre Creek was impassible on the QAA line, it was a lovely spot with the creek full, birds everywhere and grass and green vegetation all around us. What a contrast this time! The creek was nothing more than a dry sand bed and there was not a blade of grass to be seen. Still, it was a pleasant place and we spent 2 nights here.

On the drive into Eyre Creek my daughter announced that she had one goal on this trip � to roll down a sand dune � and she hadn�t done it yet. Well this was here chance with a massive dune right before the creek and within site of our camp. Mission accomplished as far as she was concerned.

Campsite at Eyre Creek Bypass

Day 12, our last day on the Madigan Line trip, saw us pack up and head into Birdsville where the group split up and went our various ways. The kids celebrated by rolling down Big Red and we had a final stop in Birdsville for a pie, fuel and of course a beer at the pub before starting the drive home.

Kids playing on Big Red

Overall the trip was fantastic. It was the first time I�d crossed the Simpson and while it�s great being out there I wouldn�t go out of my way to cross the French Line again. It was just so chopped up that it made driving a chore.

The Madigan Line was sensational. Overall it wasn�t as hard as we had expected which was probably a good thing. Good in that our vehicles weren�t under as much stress for as long as they could have been. It was rough enough following someone else�s wheel tracks and we did have a couple of days off-track, but there were sections later on particularly where the spinifex was thick where it would have been hell making a new track. Still, it would have been nice to have spent more time driving cross country with the feeling that we were the first ones to have been there. The day that I led our group cross country was my favourite part of the whole trip, even though it was a bit stressful worrying about finding the best line and getting punctures.

The sand out there was unbelievably red and we were lucky enough to have blue skies for most of the trip.

The feeling of isolation was awesome. From the time we left Mt Dare until just before Big Red heading back into Birdsville, a period of 10 or 11 days, we did not see another human being other than those in our group.

In terms of vehicles they all did the trip without any significant problems. I lost two mudflaps and the BT50 lost one. We were able to bolt them back on before heading back into Birdsville. We only had one puncture among the 4 vehicles for the whole trip.

Fuel usage was as follows:

Birdsville to Mt Dare across the French Line:
� Prado � 93 litres
� BT50 � 90 litres (I think)
� Amorok � 84 litres
� Patrol � 113 litres

From Mt Dare to Birdsville via the Madigan Line we did 770km:
� Prado � 133 litres
� BT50 � 154 litres (I think)
� Amorok � 130 litres
� Patrol � 175 litres

The Patrol is an auto and probably had the single hardest day leading on the first day going cross country. The Prado and Amorok are manual and the BT50 auto.

blkd4d · 30-09-2015, 11:55 AM

Great trip report, wouldn't mind trying the Madigan Line .

DGW · 30-09-2015, 02:52 PM

Great report, will get back to Simpson one day.

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Madigan Line June 2013

Madigan Line June 2013

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