March 31 – April 2 Hale River Homestead, Binns Track, NT

April 4, 2018 - Reading time: 2 minutes

Hale River Homestead is just a short 60km drive from Trephina Gorge on a fairly well made gravel road, that does have some interesting moments! We dropped into Arltunga historical reserve , which was very interesting. Arltunga was a gold mining town established in the 1870’s, indeed it was the first town established in the centre and the miners would catch a train to Oodnadatta and then walked the remainder of the way – it took a week. Unfortunately for most of them the boom lasted only a month or so before the alluvial gold ran out.

Well Hale River is a wonderful place to stay over Easter, we had an excellent burger at the Homestead for dinner last night to celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary. The bar was packed and even with the full moon, Maurs managed to see a satellite and meteorite. Was a very good night and we enjoyed the stories of the other residents who basically were here from Alice for the Easter weekend.

There are basically two nice walks here, one out to a lookout right on the edge of the property which is just over six kilometres in length, that provides terrific views of the surrounding countryside and the other a walk out to the property dam which is just on three kms. However, the highlight of our visit was a tour we did with Sean, examining the new cattle yards that he had built and how they worked, onto checking the Gidgee Bore and that the new calves were learning the process to access the water. The calves were in the first two weeks of their lives, and the young bulls at this stage had a value of three hundred dollars but in twelve months this would have increased ten fold.

Spectacular sunsets

Lovely campsite in the desert - green grass!