2023 Mellenbye Adventure: Day 4—The Rock
The main plan for the fourth day of my Mellenbye Adventure is for us to head about 20 klms out east of base camp to what is referred to by locals as “The Rock”.
On the HEMA map app on my smartphone ‘the Rock’ is called Wollanoo Hill. Although Wollanoo Rock would likely be a more appropriate name. And I am reasonably sure that I saw it referred to as Wooloonoo Hill or Rock on another map.
The track out to the Rock is marginally more challenging than the track to the Mellenbye Breakaways and includes a dry salt river crossing. Well … it’s dry when there is no water in the lakes. I probably would not try crossing this salt river if the lakes had water in them.
On the way to the Rock you go past a customised roo shooting vehicle that chased down its last kangaroo many years ago.
I thought this might have been an old Plymouth, but I have been reliably informed, based on the front grill, that it is an old De Soto.
After taking some shots of the abandoned De Soto roo shooters vehicle we moved on through the salt river crossing, and few other minor challenges. At pretty much the 20 klm mark you arrive at the Rock.
There is a horse in this picture. Can you spot it? It is a brass horse.
Not too long after we arrived at the Rock the weather started to turn decidedly menacing. In the back of my mind was the return trip via the salt river crossing and some other parts of the track in that might not be much fun if a good burst of rain was to fall.
Because of this we did not spend as much time at the Rock as I would have liked to. I would have liked to check out the brass horse at the top of the rock and had more of a general look around.
We did get to drive around the south base of the Rock and there seemed to be one or two likely camping spots, were one inclined to spend more time at the Rock. Possibly stay overnight if you were so prepared.
The following shot shows the weather to the north. The weather to the south was much more threatening than this.
When I lived in Morawa, which was up until I was about 25, I spent a lot of time driving around the station country. I have camped at a number of places on Mellenbye, Barnong, Kadji, and Karara. I was quite surprised to come across the Rock because I did not even know it existed. I will certainly be going back for a better look around should I get back to Mellenbye before I get too old or the other.
At this point, because I am a bit of nervous nelly, we headed back to base camp at the Mellenbye homestead. And as it had already started to rain and the road was already getting a little slippery here and there, I think I managed to do the return trip in about half the time it took to make the trip out to the rock.
This following picture, taken when we got back to the cottage, gives you some idea what the sky looked like to the south. The building on the right is The Manor (on the hill).
The dark sky over the sunlight foreground looked so impressive that I did a four frame panorama of it. I have included this below. However it is not going to look particularly amazing on a smartphone or a small screen. While most of the pictures I put onto this Website are either 1,400 or 1,600 pixels on the x-axis, the picture below is 2,300 pixels wide. Hence, if you have a 4K monitor or a 2560 x 1440 3.7K monitor then you could make your browser full screen and see the 2,300 pixel version of the picture by clicking on it.
Who doesn’t like a rainbow picture … the following rainbow picture was taken facing east from the veranda on our cottage. It was taken about two hours after the picture above was taken.
Thankfully the rain stopped in the evening and we were able to have our camp fire going.
So we got the fire going and settled in for the night.
