Monday 2nd August - Alice Springs to Trephina Gorge Nature Park

You get the impression that the East MacDonnell Ranges are like the unpopular kid at school that everybody ignores, preferring to hang out with the cool West MacDonnell Ranges.  However, we’ve been struck by how pretty they are, being a bit more subtle than the hills to the west, and the return of the sun certainly helps.

Emily Gap was busy with families enjoying their picnic lunches as today is a bank holiday in the Northern Territories, which we found out when we tried to get replacement tyres in Alice Springs (we’ll now have to wait until Darwin).

Emily Gap is one of the most important Aboriginal sites in the area, from which the caterpillar ancestral beings of Mparntwe originated before crawling across the landscape, creating the topographic features as they went.

Jessie Gap a little further down the range provided a nice spot for lunch,

then it was onto Corroboree Rock, a dolomite outcrop on the valley floor between the surrounding red ridges.

If anybody can tell us what a “corroborre area” is we’d be grateful as the guides mention that it was unlikely to have actually been used as one, but fails to explain what one is.

We’ve made it as far as the Trephina Gorge National Park, although we left the main gorge for tomorrow and instead took the short 4WD track to John Hayes Rockhole to camp for the night.  We had enough daylight left to do the 4km loop walk up the ridge,

returning along the base of the gorge which necessitated a scramble out at one point to avoid having to wade through a pool.

The gorge rates highly on our “Best gorges of Australia” list, but is probably one that few people have heard of, let alone visited. SPOT