More Field Food Failure

When available, I eat fresh fruit at breakfast.  On the first shopping trip in Newman, I was thus pleased to see lots of apples and bananas on the shelves.  There were also green bananas.  I thought, hmmm; better get some of them too.  They should ripen once the yellow ones are gone or too bruised to eat.  So I added four green bananas to the overflowing shopping cart.  I put them in the breakfast food box, and forgot about them.

A week later, the yellow bananas were getting scarce.  I dug out the green bananas.  They still seemed hard.  I tried to peel one.  No dice.  I attacked it with a knife.  Slow going: I could barely pierce its now blotchy green skin.  I broke it in half.  It snapped when it broke, and smelled unbanana-like.  Definitely not ready to eat.  I put the remaining green bananas back in the box, wrapped in plastic.

The bananas continued to annoy me.  They were impervious to any persuasion about becoming edible.  I put them in the sun.  I added a ripe banana to their bag as a role model and as a source of ethylene gas.  I considered putting them on the engine block out of spite.  Field time was almost over.  Tactically, I began to ponder how to use them effectively in their unripe state.  The engine option was a clue.  Heat would be required.

Final swag out seemed to require a final dessert.  I thought about making fried green bananas.  However, when it came time to make dinner (my turn), I was very tired.  The effort of slicing bananas, exhuming the frying pan, heating margarine, and doing the actual frying seemed too taxing, especially when the final product was dubious.  I am sure we had enough brown sugar and honey to make any result edible, but in the moment exhaustion won out.  We had plenty of biscuits and chocolate anyway. 

I ran through this thought train while watching the fire, before cooking.  As Louis and I talked we expressed the mutual regret that we were not able to have a meal of Chernobyl Potatoes on Australia Fifteen.  When we’d last shopped, the Tom Price Coles store had amazingly been empty shelved with respect to root vegetables.  Sadness.  This conversation triggered mental synthesis.  Why not make Chernobyl Bananas?  This had many advantages.  It would use up aluminum foil.  The fire was not large, but we had plenty of wood to create coals.  It would be a lot easier than frying bananas.  It would be revenge.  Finally, it might work. 

I got the three remaining bananas, punctured each one, and wrapped them carefully in foil.  When the coals were sufficient, I made a cavity in the fire pit, inserted the bananas and buried them.  Of course, I had no idea how long it takes a banana to stew in its own juice, or even if bananas will cook this way.  I worked on dinner.  I checked one of the bananas in fifteen minutes.  It was still hard. 

Dinner was served.  I forgot about the bananas.  I assume Louis did too.  I remembered them oh, about an hour later when I caught a silvery glint from the fire pit.  I got the shovel and excavated all three bananas.  They seemed very light.  Their aluminum shells were intact, but stained with soot from the fire.  No steam came from the shells, only smoke.  I knew what was coming.  The shells cooled.  I pried one open.  At its core was a banana-shaped curved blob of carbon.  Oh well.

Opened banana on left; sealed on right

I don’t know if Chernobyl Bananas would have worked, given the right bananas and the right amount of roasting time.  Interestingly, the results of my experiment weren’t just blobs of carbon; the skin and tripartite sections of each banana were still distinct.  I don’t know what this means in terms of cooking potential.  In any event, while this experiment failed to produce something edible, it did succeed in using up supplies, enacting green banana punishment, and teaching me something about cooking.  And biscuits and chocolate is always a fine dessert.

Coda: Field Food Cleverness

Reverse the setting back to that initial shopping trip at the Woolworths in Newman. 

I wanted to make an Indian curry dinner.  No worries; Patak’s sauces are readily available in Australia.  While selecting a flavor of simmer sauce, I noticed packages of naan.  They were fresh, sealed in plastic.  I thought, hmm, can’t exactly be fresh, but would be a change from rice.  I added a package of garlic naan to the cart. 

Two nights later, swagged out south of Weeli Wolli, it was time to use the naan.  I’d looked at the package earlier in the day.  It recommended warming the breads before serving.  I knew this was preferable, for the sake of cuisine as well as thwarting staleness.  Two immediate warming options came to my mind:

1.  Heat the naan in the fire: temperature control would be tricky.     
2.  Warm the naan in my frying pan: it was small, and I only had a one burner stove.

As we found and parked at the swag out site, the solution came to me.  The Patrol had a turbocharger, which had a vent on top of the hood.  I check it.  Plenty hot.  I quickly took the naan out of its plastic, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and pushed it into the vent onto the engine.  This worked very well.

Naan - inserted

I made too much food.  Louis finished the naan at lunch the next day. 

On to the Pilbara: A First Week

7/3:  quick flight to Perth, adios to Paul, hola to Louis. 

7/4: Eighteen hours in town, chilly in the morning, close to zero.  A late morning flight to Newman.  I chatted with a gent who worked as a safety trainer for a bunch of the mining contractors.  He was also in the Australian Navy Reserve, and Commander of the Sea Cadets.  He had many interesting stories. 

Newman and suddenly the weather was temperate again.  I found the truck – vehicle number four of this trip – in the car park.  It is a Nissan Patrol, which I had expected with some regret.  It’s Landcruiser Lite –a powerful engine and plenty of truckness, it’s not as taut in the gearbox or suspension as the Toyotas.  No worries – this will keep me from getting too far off road.  It was Sunday.  All of the town businesses save for the pub were closed.  We sorted gear and packed the truck.

7/5: A return to the end of last year’s field season: the gate at Orebody 18.  Last year, they pretended I had not been in contact.  This year, Phil, a BHP geo, was there to meet us within fifteen minutes of contact.  He was a young bloke, a mine geologist.  He and a couple other geos had been intrigued by the project.  Too bad only he was available on Monday. 

Our first stop was to gather safety gear and read a safety briefing.  All of the companies have gotten very serious about this, which is a good thing I suppose.  It’s a bit strange to see the uniformity of all staff in safety gear all the time, even the receptionists. 

I read the briefing materials after rolling my shirt sleeves down, as requested, to comply with the safety code.  I signed on the appropriate line.  I handed it to the safety officer.  She said, you didn’t fill it out.  I said – huh?  It was a quiz.  Oh.  This wasn’t apparent, but now I’ll never forget that I should call for help on Channel 84.  We put on our safety vests, hard hats, safety glasses, and stowed our gloves and ear plugs, and headed out in Phil’s truck. 

I had not been to this research site for nine years; on that visit I was jet lagged so it was a haze anyway.  Nonetheless, the scenery began to look familiar.  We parked, and within thirty minutes I’d found the spherule layer. 

It’s remarkable to me that my long term memory retains the visual map of this spot in the Pilbara, much less that I can so unerringly look at the rocks anywhere out here and find what I am after.  If it were possible to quantify the last twenty-five years, I’ve spent relatively little time in the Pilbara, and even less looking at its rocks.  Yet this place is ingrained in me.  I don’t think I’ll ever loose the capacity and knowledge of here.  I suppose this is true of places that are significant in one’s life.  My time here has consistently been a catalyst in my maturation through the various stages of life.  That has to help.

Anyway, Phil was delighted to see the impact layer and hear about how we think it formed. He waited patiently while Louis and I did our work.  We were off-site – free of safety gear and able to take risks again – by early afternoon. 

The shops in Newman were open.  $450 later, we had enough chairs, ice, gas, food, water, and other random gear to last a week or two.  There was still time to drive west on Rt. 95, shoot the gap north through Cathedral Gorge, and swag out off of the track to Weeli Wolli. 

7/6:  Oh, the pleasure of a first night under the Southern Cross, with the only noise the very distant murmur of road trains.  A partially cloudy sky; the weather seemed unsettled.  Louis was still asleep.  I got up and stared at the back of the truck.  Well, I opened it first.  I’d quickly sorted and packed all of the food, water and gear the previous evening.  With each new vehicle, it’s a geometric challenge to fit everything in ways that don’t rattle, abrade the truck, or cause self destruction.  It’s was made a bit more challenging by the second spare tyre, which hogged a large inconvenient section of storage space.  However, the current set up of the Patrol looked pretty good, although the chairs, shovel, and stove seemed ready to fall out.

After breakfast, I drove us on to Weeli Wolli.  This was another return to the scene of the crime from last year, only this time I was in search of the new spherule layer.  With minimal effort, we found the track we took to the research site last year.  It was a rubbly and rough drive, but at least there was a track.  We eventually came to a reasonable outcrop of dolomite; the main type of limestone that makes up the lower Wittenoom Formation, where the Paraburdoo Layer is located.  I don’t know these rocks as well. They are poorly exposed, and when you do see them, they comprise thin layers of brown laminated rock.  Yawn.  Nonetheless, it was time to learn them, in order to find the Paraburdoo Layer. 

Weeli Wolli is a fairly large drainage, typical of the southern Hamersley Basin.  It occurs in the soft rocks – the Wittenoom – and takes advantage of the abundant folds and faults in the area.  To us, this meant that the dolomite exposures we looked at were isolated hill-sized blobs.  Well, time to work with what nature provided.  We worked uphill.  The dolomite began to show a consistent stratigraphy that we could trace from outcrop to outcrop.  This was a relief.  However, we couldn’t find the spherule layer. 

I could tell that the dolomite continued downhill and across the creek from where the truck sat.  Near the northern edge of the drainage, there was a nice ravine with good outcrop on both sides.  This seemed like a good target.  After lunch we set out.

Back to walking on rubbly stumbly outcrops, through and around spinifex, and scrambling down cliffs.  My route hit the main Weeli Wolli drainage.  It showed evidence of recent flooding; large gum trees lay horizontal in the channels, their roots and branches packed with debris.  The bare dolomite outcrops were polished and scoured.  Large bars of gravel and cobbles partially covered them, and made walking tricky. 

We made it across, and got to my target ravine.  I left Louis there to look for the spherule layer, while I walked uphill to tie us into the stratigraphy we’d looked at earlier in the day.  Of course, I went slowly so I could look for the spherule layer.  This means staring at every visible bed, a slow process. 

I performed my once-a-field season fall into the spinifex.  A couple dozen punctures in the left hand and arm, oh well.  I’d climbed high enough, it was time to turn around and find Louis.  I figured, we’d looked hard, but no layer, no regrets.

When I got back to the ravine, he waved something at me and mumbled indistinctly (a trend).  Eventually I understood that he’d found the layer!  A few very minimal outcrops at the top of the cliff on the south side of the ravine.  I was suddenly happy, and forgot the allergy-induced fatigue I had been suffering.  We had a look.  Definitely spherules.  I was bemused to have a new spherule section.  I’d essentially assumed we would not find it at Weeli Wolli.  I was happy to be surprised.  It reinforced my faith in serendipity.  If I had not gone on walkabout, and Louis weren’t so thorough and inclined to scramble up cliffs, we would have never found the one centimeter of spherules at Weeli Wolli.

7/7: The morning entertainment was a several hour drive from Weeli Wolli to my next site, Range Gorge.  More time north on Rt. 95, then west towards Wittenoom from Auski.  Range Gorge is one of the series of steep valleys that cuts the north side of the Hamersley Range.  There are no tracks into it, nor does it have access from Karijini National Park.  However, an exploration company drilled a research core here in the late 1980s.  I’ll look at that in Perth next week.  I wanted to come here to look at the above ground part of the section, in the hopes of finding the Paraburdoo Layer. 

The first challenge was to find the twenty four year old track to the drill site.  A new berm on the site of the road made this tricky, but with some high torque from the Patrol, we succeeded.  I was pleased to see that the drill site, the outcrops of dolomite behind it, and several hundred acres of the surrounding bush had recently burned.  Bare rock, burnt bushes and trees, and the ashes of spinifex – what’s not to like?  It was dramatic.  The bare rock of the plain ended right at the first cliff of dolomite; a xeriscape without the plants (currently). 

More dolomite, only this time a straightforward bottom to top section to see and learn.  I again put Louis to work at bed by bed examination, and went climbing to get perspective on the overall stratigraphy.  My coordination was a bit dicey from my allergies, but I looked, climbed, and eventually got oriented.  I’d managed to climb an isolated knob.  In the 180 degree view in front of me the Hamersley Range continued to rise.  There were a series of intriguing rock overhangs in the cliffs right below me.  I immediately thought: Aboriginal sites?  To the right (west), Range Gorge cut into the cliffs, its incision making a broad alluvium- and gum tree-filled valley.  It was a big drainage.  I wanted to walk up it and see what was there.  Maybe very long day hike In the future?  The Fortescue River plain filled the scene behind me.  Broad, flat, and mostly burned off from my vantage.  The Chichester Ranges were barely visible on the horizon.  I loved this view. 

Louis had not found the layer.  We worked it over together.  It wasn’t there, or was hiding really well.  Actually, there were a number of thick landside beds in the dolomite, which is unusual.  Their presence meant that the Paraburdoo Layer had to be deeper underground.  I hope we can find it in the core when we get back to Perth.

Our work done, I suggested a walk to look at the overhangs I’d seen.  We scrambled up the burned over drainage.  There was still plenty of loose rock.  The overhangs were all at the top of steep talus piles.  They turned out to be kangaroo hostels, based on the tracks and droppings covering the area.  If the Aboriginals used these sites, they did not leave any evidence. 

Time to explore was good.  This is one beneficial aspect of this research project.  The rock unit we are looking for is so specific that I can definitely say we’ve looked hard for it, time to cease.  Projects covering a broader areas require more self-control.  It’s thus a luxury to have energy and time for a post-work stroll in the bush.

7/8: A cloudy morning, especially in the west.  That was our direction of travel.  I thought, a good day for driving; my plan was to commute to the west edge of the Hamersley Basin, where there was a potential Paraburdoo Layer exposure.  Escaping from Range Gorge, I pointed the truck west on the Wittenoom-Pannawonica road.  Time to sit and drive, racing over the Fortescue River floodplain at maximum safe speed.  A landscape covered with mulga and gum trees; frequent cattle sightings too.  We passed the Mt. Florance Station turnoff.  Coolawanyah Station was next.  Coolawanyah had done a particularly nice job marking their turnoff, using a pair of nicely painted tractor tyres. 

A pause at the Rio Tinto railway to watch an ore train roll by, headed north.  A bit more than a kilometer long.  I lost count of the number of ore cars.  All that rock, going to China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea.  I wonder how many of my home appliances are made with Pilbara iron ore? 

The sky was darker.  I could see rain bands in the west.  Oh crap.  Nothing to do but drive onwards.  A light sprinkle began at lunch time.  Good, the Patrol windshield wipers were in decent shape.  The rain got heavier.  I was relieved we were on a main track.  It was unsealed, but the surface was well-compacted so it wasn’t immediately going to turn into a sea of red mud. 

I had to put the wipers on high and slow down.  Water began to puddle on the road.  About forty kilometers from Pannawonica, the sky lightened.  The rain stopped.  The wet track was doing just fine.  I slowed for the numerous muddy patches.  Splash!  Oops, that big puddle was more of a pool.  The white Patrol was now largely red, up to about mid-window height.  No worries, we did not loose traction.

Stopping in Pannawonica seemed like a good idea.  I wanted a tarp for weather security.  Panna is another mining town.  It was founded in the early 1960s like Tom Price and Newman.  Its independent operation was absorbed by Rio Tinto in the 1990s.  It’s a small place.  Luckily the store had a tarp, bread, and the other few things that we needed.

OK, the clouds seemed to have dissipated, but where to go?  I saw a sign that said Bungaroo Project, pointing south down a wide track.  Hmm, Bungaroo Creek was pretty close to where I wanted to look the Paraburdoo Layer.  The track was good, built by Rio Tinto.  Definitely for exploration; roads cut off from it at intervals to drill sites.  We eventually found a old, unused side track and swagged out. 

The clouds gradually returned.  We were at a relatively low elevation at 360 meters.  It was warm and after the rain, strangely humid with a strong smell of damp rocks.  We swagged close to the Patrol, and prepared for a quick evacuation.  I fell asleep right away.

Only to wake up with rain falling on my face at 12:30 am.  Time to bolt.  We threw our stuff in the Patrol and headed back to the main road, stopping just at the berm.  Slow, somewhat anxious driving through a heavy downpour.  Parked, we sat in the truck.  The downpour stopped.  Louis bravely set up his tent.  I went to sleep again, in the driver’s seat.  No worse that economy class on a Qantas 747.

7/9: I woke up at 4 am.  The stars were out.  I spread out my swag and got a bit more rest.  Dawn and the weather looked a bit more settled.  Still partially cloudy: numerous blue patches.  The brief storms had soaked the ground to a depth of six centimeters at most.

We went in search of the old Pannawonica to Millstream road.  When I came to the Pilbara in 1985, this was the main route from Wittenoom to Panna and beyond to the coast road.  The Bungaroo Project road had bisected it somewhere.  I’d missed it the night before in haste to make a wet swag out. 

This trip has been much more about hunt and find than Australia Fourteen.  We’ve done all the easy sites.  The project has pushed into the peripheries of the Hamersley Basin: more remote, old, and less traveled tracks.  Finding the old Millstream Road is a good example.  It was on my Pilbara Tourist map (1:1000000 scale) and on my topographic map (1:100000 scale).  My GPS, which includes the topo database, showed us where we were: not on the Millstream Road.  However, this was useless.  We could tell the geographic direction to go, but which route to take to get to it?  All of the new mining tracks weren’t on any map or the GPS.  Finally, I decided, let’s just try this one: a straight track, probably a mining survey line, plowed through the bush.  It cut the Millstream Road in about 2 kilometers.  The GPS confirmed our location.  Easy continued.

I’d wanted to find the Millstream Road in order to get to the Jimmawurranda Creek area.  I’d been there in 1985 with Bruce, and subsequently for some of my Ph. D work.  It had dolomite.  Thirty kilometers of damp dirt track, and a couple road encounters (see a future post) later, wee found a good site.  It was mid-morning.  The sky was clear enough to seriously boost my morale.

This project requires optimism.  As I wrote in the introduction, the Paraburdoo Layer is at most a couple of centimeters thick: fingernail-scale.  Imagine trying to find this amidst discontinuous outcrops, talus, spinifex, faults, fold, streams, and other complexifiers and the need for hope should be clear.  One helpful bit is that the spherule layer weathers to a grey-green color, which is unlike the usual brown dolomite, black to grey to ochre to red cherts, tan shales, and green volcanic rocks.  Unless of course, any or all of the above are covered by an orange-red iron stain, whitish caliche, or purple-black desert varnish. 

Does this mean I’m an optimist?  Well, at minimum I’m persistent.  I like the feeling of success.  There is also the hope of finding something new, unusual, and exciting.  This is also a great excuse to be outdoors, in Aus, and looking at rocks.

We went south of the road.  Lots of dolomite exposures, along with abundant folds and faults.  Déjà vu for the Weeli Wolli sections.  However, just like that site, my observations began to crystallize quickly into stratigraphic patterns.  Ok, these two black chert/golden carbonate sequences are here, above the think dolomite beds…  Intensely creative and useful as long as I wrote it down. 

Lunch and time to work to the north.  It seemed a good idea to pick a campsite first.  The bush was thick and unburned throughout the area.  I think it always has been.  This meant that best bet for swag out was a stream drainage.  Drainages always have plenty of wood stacked up from past floods, a reasonable sky view for star patrol, and the stream sediments are often softer than typical Pilbara soils.  So how do you find a good place to swag out in a stream?  Bruce and I evolved the following technique in the late 1980s:

1)      Aim the truck along a fairly wide drainage: one that’s pretty open, where there’s potential to get far of the road.

2)      If tyre tracks exist, follow them.  They usually mean some one has successfully followed the drainage, and returned (hopefully).

3)      Bounce along as far as you can stand, trying to control the truck as it groans in 4WD over bars of sand, gravel and small boulders.

4)      Back up frequently to avoid drop offs that would bog the truck.

5)      Get tired.

6)      See the right place to stop: room for swags, a fire pit, a kitchen, and the truck.

7)      Park, fall out of the truck and recover.

Louis and I did this.  He’s initiated now. 

The rocks to the north called.  We walked several kilometers and looked at a dozen outcrops.  The rocks showed the same sequence as south of the road.  Interesting but disappointing; we were not getting any deeper in the stratigraphic section, meaning that the Paraburdoo Layer was buried.  Just like Range Gorge

.

7/10: I’d driven at least 760 kilometers since July 4^th, mostly on unsealed roads.  A good night’s sleep in the Jimmawurranda Creek drainage had helped, but I was still tired after the rainy night.  Louis was developing a cold.  My allergies were fading but still taxing.  Another long drive was next on the agenda.  It seemed like a good time for a break.  We followed the Millstream Road to Millstream.

Millstream is a part of national park.  It’s historical; Millstream Station opened in the late 19^th century as a cattle station and sheep station.  The sheep didn’t last, at minimum because dingoes find lambs to be delectable.  The cattle station persisted into the 1980s, when the government took over the lease, i.e., no more cows.  Well, this is the colonial history of Millstream.  The station site was a in a logical site because it is where a major aquifer breaches to the Earth’s surface.  This has formed fairly permanent spring-fed pools.  Of course, the Aboriginals knew this was an important place a good 20,000 years ago.  New signs at the station indicated that Millstream has been an important gathering site for a number of different groups for at least that long. 

I was happy to be someplace that was verdant and wet.  We had enough energy for a couple of short walks among the pools.  It was quite strange to hear and see running water: well, water running on the ground, not falling from clouds.  Millstream had a real feeling of oasis.  This was most poignant at the lily pond; a pool full of flowers, seeded there by one of the station women over one hundred years ago.  I’ve never seen wild water lilies before. 

Most of the large Millstream pools follow old channels of the Fortescue River, creating long curved water bodies.  A swim in one of these was indicated as a pre-lunch activity.  I jumped in, and happily floated in the cloud of dust, sweat, and grime dissolved from my skin as I paddled about. 

Back to work.  More dolomite called to the south, along the Hamersley Front.  Back to hunt and find.  Ok, Millstream was on the maps, so we knew where we were starting from.  How about this track?  Damn, a “Pastoral Lease – No Passage” sign, hand lettered in green paint on a sheet of corrugated iron.  It didn’t say which station this was: no one to call about access.  OK, let’s go seventeen kilometers and try this one.  A locked gate, another hand lettered sign.  This trend continued monotonically.  I was annoyed and somewhat frustrated; the day was passing, it was time to find a swag out spot. 

The road intersected the Pilbara Iron railway line (Karratha-Tom Price-Paraburdoo).  I’d gotten an access permit, so we headed south along the tracks.  More locked gates.  Finally, the power line road, following the same trend as the railway, but here cutting across the bush – pretty close to a dolomite exposure.  We took it.  We swagged out close to the Front, in hopeful site a good outcrop for the next morning’s work.

Reflections I: The Work

Australia Fourteen achieved almost all of my scientific goals. I felt charmed. The route through the basin fell into a fairly logical counterclockwise loop; I was able to follow this with little deviation, anxiety, or frustration. Past trips have felt more erratic. The many new tracks, largely from minerals exploration or existing mines, made access to my target sites almost too easy. I had anticipated driving on the archetypical abandoned outback road; a barely visible track covered by spinifex, brush, and trees, visible only from faint wheel tracks and the berm on each side of the road. I was also hoping for a serious washout or two: somewhere to actually put the Cruiser through its low range 4WD paces. This happened exactly once during the field season. I missed the adventure of such challenging slow driving, and to some degree the risk of getting bogged, just a little. I’m happy to trade this feeling for the excitement and joy of spending more time doing the work: hiking, looking at the rocks, seeing new and familiar places enjoying the flora and fauna, and making pictures. Nor is my persistent back injury from Aikido isn’t complaining about good roads.

In addition, Louis and I were able to find the impact layer at every target site. This was a challenge when the outcrop was new to me, or physically steep and rubbly. This was the only situation where I felt any consistent anxiety. Would we find the layer? Did I pick the wrong place to look? Am I too high in the section? Too low? Will the exposures, if I find them, be good enough for lateral measurement? Again, it was almost too easy. As I wrote in an early post though, this is the magic of the Hamersley Basin strata: consistent stratigraphy, good exposure.

Louis did very well. I made him start working independently on the second day in the field, and he consistently improved with practice and spontaneous quizzing. He continually asked me intelligent and curious questions about the geology and natural history of the Pilbara. Many made me think. I could answer maybe two-thirds of them. I also give him credit for putting up with me for a couple weeks. Getting out in the field is one of my sources of escape from society. If I could, I wouldn’t talk much if at all for the whole time.

The First Week in the Pilbara

18th June – Up at 4:30, out of the Mounts Bay Road Lodge after three nights in Perth. A 2 hour QantasLink flight to Newman: one of the three major iron ore mining towns in the Pilbara. After a bit of a wait due to crossed emails, CoreFleet arrived with our Toyota Landcruiser. It lacked spare tyres. Whoops. Off to the CoreFleet motor pool, where a rather embarrassed mecho put a pair of extras on the vehicle. Back to “downtown” Newman, iso a week’s worth a food, camping supplies, and most importantly, a key multi-use tool: the shovel. A Chicken Treat lunch, a gear sort on the footie oval, and off we went into the field.

My first site was the Weeli Wolli Creek area. Bruce and I were first there in 1985: we tried to access the same area in 2007, but the road we’d used to get to the area of interest was almost fully overgrown. I kind of knew where it was, and worried that we would not be able to find it. The dirt road weaved past the Rhodes Ridge exploration camp; a relic from the 1960s. We crossed Weeli Wolli Creek for about the eighth time, and came to the area of the track. There it was; fresh tyre tracks indicated recent use. After a rough bounce, we arrived right at the section I wanted to look at.

First swag out in the Pilbara. Rocky ground; blocky chert talus from the hills I wanted to work on. Sundown, and the stars appeared. Oh, to be able to see this full sky of stars for more than a couple weeks per year. A joy to see the Southern Cross, Scorpio, the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds. Chilly, not too cold.


19th June – Up at 6, time to photograph the sunrise. My numb fingers fussed with the tripod and other gear, but I was in plenty of time to make some good exposures. Shoot and learn. My usual breakfast: fruit, more fruit, soy milk, peanuts, a bit of muesli.

Up the hill to the impact layer. Wow, not what I’d expected from a quick look the day before. A thick spherule zone at the base, overlain by a good meter of mass flow (underwater landslide) deposits. Time to start training Louis. Here is how to take my dictation. No, don’t wind up the tape between every section, it wastes time. Please keep me honest when I confuse planar laminations and parallel laminations.

Descending the hill after measurement. I always forget that Hamersley Range hillsides are bloody steep and rubbly. It would be too easy to take a dive off ledge, courtesy of the wrong chunk of loose rock, and fall three or four meters. And probably land in spinifex. I never forget how spiny this grass feels when it sticks me in the hands, legs, knees and butt. I’d never climb a hill like this at home; I guess I’ll do anything for rocks. I look for wallaby trails, they pick the good lines.

The view is worth the treachery of steepness and poky plants. The Weeli Wolli drainage forms a broad valley, punctuated by small buttes of dolomite and the winding course of the stream, outlined by white gum trees.


20th June. I wanted to take Louis to Weeli Wolli Spring, one of the few places in the Pilbara with consistent surface water. It’s about eighteen kilometers north from yesterday’s work area. More dirt road. I like being back in a Landcruiser. It has a tighter suspension than the Nissan we had in the NT. It’s geared lower, and the engine seems to have more juice. A better field vehicle. More fun to drive.

I have also been meaning to comment; this truck, the NT Nissan, every other field truck I’ve had in Aus, and all the mine vehicles have tyres with a narrow tread width. The Cruiser’s are 235s. This is a stark contrast to standard SUV tires in the US, which are much wider. I wonder why – practicality of use vs. appearance? There’s plenty of dirt, mud, rock, and so forth to drive across here, much tougher than asphalt in any country.

We camped at Weeli Wolli Spring last night, by the water. The natural flow has been subsumed by groundwater pumped out the Hope Downs mine; the stream literally roared just a few meters from the campsite. Its good for flowers; I see a new type of creeping violet. It’s not in my plant book.

In the morning, a brief walk along the drainage, above the mine water input. Scattered pools appeared amidst the rubble of the otherwise dry drainage. Weeli Wolli is home to lots of kajput paper bark gum trees. Like most eucalypts, this tree sheds its bark, but instead of coming loose in sheets, it peels away in delicate, paper like layers. They’re white, and look perfect for writing till you touch them and they dissolve. I take some close-ups of peeling bark. My eye is also attracted by the abundant flood debris – from last summer’s cyclone? The broken ruptured shapes of small trees and shrubs wrapped around larger trunks cheers me up. I’m not sure why.

Later in the day, a second work site, at an undisclosed location. See my earlier blog.


21st June. A cold swag out, enhanced by some star track photography. I somehow managed to get the south astronomical pole in just the right place. Good dawn photography on the hill.

Today was ninja day. I knew exactly where I wanted to work, but getting there required either crossing a mine lease without permission or taking an unused road in Karijini National Park. We headed up Route 95. The mine lease road turned off to the left. I equivocated. Intuition said keep going; don’t risk the wrath of Rio Tinto or their surrogates. Another hour in the truck, into Karijini. The park road I wanted to take went past the ranger HQ. I figured what the heck. As we drove in, a ranger was driving out. We waved to each other. I kept going.

Another track in excellent condition. This was formerly the main drag from the Wittenoom-Roy Hill Road through to Newman. It passed several stations and mining camps; Juna Downs, Packsaddle, Rhodes Ridge. We used it extensively before the sealed Rt. 95 came into existence. Again, a track in great shape. I kept expecting washouts, trees growing in the road, or some other hazard. But the track was great. I’d given Louis responsibility for keeping track of our progress on topo and geologic maps. He slowly gets the hang of it.

The road turned east. On our left, a promising section appeared. We parked off the road, geared up, and climbed another hill. After some casting around, I found spherules at the base of a three meter bed. Wow, very thick! Usually it’s about a tenth of this. A cool variation; much of the thickness came from a massive, very muddy bed, probably the settle out of a cloud of mud on the sea floor.

I was happy. We’d snuck into the section, and it was a good one. The work finished, we headed back up the Juna Downs road. I made Louis practice driving a manual transmission. He did fine. Just past the ranger station, the pieces of a wrecked airplane were laid out by the side of the road. It must have crashed and burned nearby, and been reassembled as such here. The light was good; I backed up to take a picture. As we got out the truck, a familiar hiss sounded. Crap, the left rear tyre was going flat. I taught Louis how to change a truck tyre. He did fine. Unfortunately, the spot where we had to change the tyre was about the dustiest area of the road. We were both coated in red dust by the time the new tyre was on.


22nd June - The combination of a flat tyre and personal red dust layering dictated a night at the Auski Tourist Village. Sigh, I’m glad that Auski exists; showers, a mechanic, and clean campground and facilities are nice luxuries. But it’s not the same as camping in bush, with no one around. Auski is also a stop for road trains en route to Newman or Port Hedland. So it’s noisy, bright, and loud. I wasn’t ready for civilization yet. But the shower felt really good.

In the morning, after the tyre was declared healthy, I pointed the Cruiser east towards Roy Hill. I wanted to go to the eastern edge of the outcrop area, where I hoped we could find the impact layer before it dived below the surface of the Fortescue River Valley.

Into the morning sun. A broad, dusty road, fairly dusty, but virtually no traffic. Again, I had a destination in mind: Koodaideri. I have no clue where this name came from; it could be Aboriginal, or butchered English of some sort. Bruce and I were last here in 1986. We drove as far as I could stand it before turning south to the hills. Another quick walk up a steep, rubbly hill. The spinifex was longer here. More time had passed since a burn.

I spied a promising bed above me. It looked like the Juna Downs impact layer; intriguingly and anomalously thick. I climbed straight up the slope at it, over low cliffs, through bushes and spinifex.

The bed was not what I expected. Wow – it was full of boulders! This very unusual in the Hamersley Basin, where mud is the fashionable grain size. I was mesmerized. Oh yeah, look for spherules. Bugger, could not find any in the bed, at all. I looked carefully. Louis looked carefully. None, none at all. Oh well, it was still cool. Many of the boulders in the bed were limestone which showed evidence of forming in shallow water: stromatolites and evaporites were common. Very, very cool. I’d never seen this stuff here before; it outcrops 250 kilometers to the northeast (where the shallow water was 2.5 billion years ago). A couple of the boulders were the size of the Cruiser. Very, very very cool. I am a sucker for giant clasts. This bed had to be a debris flow deposits; a type of cohesive, mud-rich underwater landslide. Looking at these guys is some of my favorite geology. Now if it had only contained impact spherules. Still, a fun discovery.

Late morning, still time to investigate the Koodaideri area. A bit further east, and another track towards the hills. It ended amid the ruins of a good half dozen buildings. Maybe this was the original Koodaideri? It could have been an outstation for one of the grazing operations that were here before the mines came in. All the remained were concrete foundations, bits of wire, and trash. Louis found a broken bottle from a brewer in Wittenoom, the old asbestos mining town sixty kilometers to the west. Wittenoom has been gone for over fifty years. I tried to feel this place. Who lived here? Did they like it? Did they enjoy the lovely Hamersley Range? Did they go to the Fortescue Hotel in Wittenoom to relax on days off? Where are they now?

It was 3:30. No sign of the impact layer, but a good day for seeing cool rocks and touching a bit of the recent past.

The most elusive impact layer in the Hamersley basin is located at the very top of the Jeerinah Formation, well below the spherule layer that’s the focus of this trip. Having given Koodaideri our best look see, I thought it worthwhile to run north across the Fortescue River Valley from Auski, to where the Jeerinah crops out.

Route 95 crosses the very broad Fortescue River valley as it heads towards the equator (it doesn’t get there, to be clear). The Fortescue flows only during floods, I suspect. I’m not even sure when we crossed the drainage per se. All the mulga, gum, and spinifex had a bathtub ring of mud from the last flood; no way to tell exactly where the drainage was.

We ascended out of the valley; a severe climb of at least 15 meters. The landscape here is different. Most of the rock is volcanic; the land looks burnt to a deeper shade of orange than I am used to from the Hamersley Ranges. It looks to support a more meager plant community as well. This might be because it makes for poorer soil, worse drainage, or something else I have not thought of.

It was 5, getting close to time to camp. Louis spied the old dirt road from Wittenoom to Port Hedland; another route supplanted by progress and bitumen. We turned off on it, drove far enough to not be able to hear road traffic, and swaged out.

23rd June. The Jeerinah outcrops were poor. I was able to identify the right stratigraphic interval and locations pretty easily, but the key areas were covered by scree and spinifex. Oh well, we looked. Time to head back to the Hamersley Ranges and the real project.

Lunch in Wittenoom Gorge. As I have probably written in previous years, Wittenoom was an asbestos mining community from the 1930s to the 1960s. It withered once the asbestos market died. The Australian government has been killing the town off since then to discourage visitors. There are no services available, save for a pay phone two kilometers east of town. Almost every building – including the source of the bottle Louis found at Koodaideri – has been torn down. A few holdouts and their private property remain. It’s eerie; I remember when the main street was lined with buildings.

I drove up Wittenoom Gorge to find a nice lunch spot. It’s still beautiful, although the asbestos fibers in the road and chunks of ore in the stream reminded me that it was not a place to linger. The water level in Cathedral Pool, my favorite spot, was quite high. The best lunch spot there was covered in lemon grass. No room to sit; no one had been there in a while.

A partial compensation for the lack of a spherule layer at Koodaideri, we measured a beautiful version of the layer adjacent to Wittenoom’s rubbish tip. Besides a great section, this area had the longest spinifex I’ve seen this trip. Louis hadn’t really had the pleasure of spinifex yet; this was his unavoidable introduction. The only way to move forward was to crash through the spinifex tuffs, take the pain of continual punctures, and wait for one’s legs to go numb.

Wittenoom Gorge is not place to camp. We headed further west to Bee Gorge to swag out. This is another favorite spot. It was a bit challenging this time. While there were plenty of all the usual items needed for a good camp: wood, flat only semi rocky spots to sleep, space to spread out, and a view, there were a couple distractions. First, the ground was alive with small insects. They did not seem interested in our food or in us, but they inevitably crawled onto whatever gear was in contact with the ground. That would be everything. Second, the sky became ominously cloudy. The light dimmed; I knew this meant rain was possible.

24th June – We slept through the bugs. The sky stayed gray. Intermittent drizzle began in the morning. It was a damp breakfast. I did not want to be stuck on a dirt track in any sort of rain. It was time to go to Tom Price.

As we headed out the track to the main dirt road, the showers began. The windshield wipers worked; that was a relief. I drove carefully west and then south through the range front. The rain got heavier, but was still intermittent. It was noticeably cooler; low clouds hit the landmarks I expected to see once we cleared Rio Tinto Gorge. The track was still fairly dry. I was glad to see that we were leaving a dust cloud behind us. Finally, bitumen 60 kilometers from Tom Price. The rain was steady but light.

Tom Price in the rain: another new experience. The Tourist Information Centre predicted rain all day. We shopped. I called my contact at the mine and set up time the next day to work on site. We did internet. One of the Cruiser’s back doors froze shut: probably dust in the mechanism. I pulled the plastic panels off, moved all the wires and stuff around, banged on it, but could not get it to function. Annoying. It rained really hard for 30 minutes – a real downpour. Wet schoolchildren wandered by.

It was time to swag out. Where to go? It was going to be wet wherever we went. I know it would be lower south of town. We drove a bit, found a track, and eventually came to a spot big enough for the truck, two swags, and a cooking spot. It rained. I sat in the truck and read. Louis built a shelter using our tarps and read. It got dark. I cooked. We slept in the increasingly intermittent rain.

Now I’ve seen rain in the Pilbara three times. This was certainly the most intense. Luckily it was congruent with my plans, and more inconvenient than anything else. All my gear is plastic; it dries fast. I discovered that spinifex is quite lovely when it’s wet.