A little about last weeks camping adventure.

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Originally uploaded by robandwend.

So we went off to some ex-pastoral leased land, (specificallu Kadji Kadji, Lochada and Warriedar). This land was aquired by the commonwealth and state government for the Biodiversity significance of its fauna and flora. It's now managed by the Department of Conservation and Land Management.

The club goes along each year, and over about 20 days does work to help out. Here you can see on of the signs being put up by one of the many abandoned wells. The wells themselves range from clearly marked, and reasonably safely marked hand dug holes, to some scarey looking man traps descending with little warning into the deeps of the earth.

The chaps can be seen here destroying the threads of the nuts fastening the sign - it's a shame that even way out here people are still liable to vandalise / remove the signs given half a chance.

Tree bark
Originally uploaded by robandwend.

Here's an interesting shot showing how the bark of many of our native trees falls away, only to re-grow. Given the current drought conditions, it was still suprising to see how many trees and shrubs still survived.

It does look like we came at the wrong time of year though, as some photos taken by members from previous years (a couple of months later in the year) show the area in a totally different light - the currently barren soil being totally covered in native wild-flowers.

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Originally uploaded by robandwend.

Here we see an old van left to rust. It appears in many of these abandoned stations, much was just left behind - leaving a quite sad looking rust world behind. Even childrens small bikes were left behind, rusing in the sun next to the decaying houses.

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Originally uploaded by robandwend.

The evening were spent by the fire - it quickly turned very cold, and the burning of the fence posts was much appreciated.

By the time we arrived, the wood stocks were high from all the fencing which had been removed. The purpose of removing the wide / picked fences is to give the native wildlife better access, as much of the land was cordened off by the miles of wire.

In the car.
Originally uploaded by robandwend.

Here's the front of the forester. Perhaps not clear from the photo, we had two GPS's mounted on the window - both were not really of much use, since the maps they contained simply didn't show the roads around this area. One map showing the fence lines did help to some extent, but the distances were so great even these were often very inaccurately drawn.

In the end, a third hand help GPS proved to be the greatest help - it didn't have any maps on it, which stopped any confusion along the way (we simply drew our own as we traveled).

Salt lake
Originally uploaded by robandwend.

Due to over use, man has altered the water tables in these areas, and caused the natural salts to rise to the surface along with the fluctuating water levels - making the use of the land inviable. This has become a real problem for many farms in WA and much effort is being put in to try to resolve the problem.

None of the photos of the salt lakes we found does them justice. In the blazing sun they looked shear white - just like a huge snow field. All over them were these salt structures, caused by the salty water settling over (now long dead) plants and forming amazing salt sculptures.

White rock
Originally uploaded by robandwend.

Here's an interesting rock formation we found. Looking quite like the salt lakes we've found earlier, on closer inspection this was 'rock' hard rock. . I don't know what type it was - but it was as white as white can be.

Emu's graveyard
Originally uploaded by robandwend.

A rather sad location was what's known as the Emu's graveyard.

Once the stations were shutdown, and the water (bores) turned off, the remaining Emu's headed for new ground. But came up against the fences. Here they just gathered up and died, apparently the bodies were so deep that in the end they were able to climb over the carcasses to scale the fence line.

For a good half an hour we drove by the fence, seeing fields of bones.

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Originally uploaded by robandwend.

We sure wouldn't want to camp too close to these ant hills !

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Originally uploaded by robandwend.

And finally from this mammoth blog post - here's one of the many photos of abandoned shearing sheds.