Day 503 | Warren Gorge: rockhopper territory
47 km | zzOz total: 16,294 km
The terrific road surface continues and what’s more it’s all downhill until lunchtime.
I cross the Willochra Plain, now a straggly saltbush landscape with occasional sheep matching in stragglyness, they always look ungainly when recently shorn, but various piles of rock every k or so, some discernible as one time habitation, indicate that once high hopes were sold about the agricultural prospects of the area. Good rainfall for successive years in the early 1870s encouraged settlers to toil with the soil and initially it paid off. But reality came around quickly and overstocking with sheep and poor rainfall meant most people simply walked off the land.
My lunchtime stop was at Simmonston where enthusiastic entrepreneurs started building a 2 storey pub and a general store in 1880 but before completion the proposed railway was rerouted making their buildings redundant before opening. I guess the two competing flour mills built in the saltbush lands of Hawker were similarly short lived.
But I’m here in Warren Gorge, not the grandest landscape feature of my travels, 300 m long with 800 million year old rock tilted on end as backdrop, the real excitement here is over the endangered Yellow footed rock wallaby, a small marsupial compared with the completely un-endangered Euro or Big Red kangaroo. Their adornment is dramatic for what are usually drab marsupials: yellow feet of the elongated variety, an even longer tail proportionately, delightfully fully stripey, and the head and body with white stripes which make the species difficult to identify in daylight hours when they loll about out of sight up the gorge cliffs.
In the evening they hop down unconcerned by dramatic drops, the tail balancing the leaps as they come down shyly to munch on the grass, etc, at lower levels, not that there is much greenery around. I wander slowly along the gorge at the end of a 5 km circuit as the sun goes down and spot five of the gorgeous gorge creatures which is exactly five more than I saw last time I was here.
Lovely little hoppers.