4x4

The plan

It’s simple, leave from Purni bore, and arrive at Birdsville… except its not that simple. The Simpson is a criss cross of different “lines”. You have the QAA, Rig Road, French line, K1 line, Madigan and others. Each serving a specific purpose in the past and today offering different challenges.

Your typical crossing picking a straight route across is probably around 3-4 days. This is 3-4 days without access to water, shops, or fuel. We however decided on route that touched on the French, Madigan, QAA and K1. The idea being that we wanted to see a bit of everything along with check out some of the interesting POIs like Poeppel’s corner (the corner of QLD, SA and NT).

This resulted in a plan that was upwards of 12 days and 914km without services. We plan on days being low kilometers to ensure we have enough water and fuel in case something goes wrong or backtracking is required.

Adding to complications was the recent rainfall in the area. We had to keep a close eye on river levels / crossing locations and which properties we could enter and exit through.

In the end we completed the trip with 8 days in the desert. The second half of Hay River track was exceptionally good, and we breezed through the QAA line. A lot faster than the Madigan and French lines.

Permits

There’s a number of permits required when travelling the Simpson. For the Madigan line a Central Land Council entry permit is required as you are travelling through their land. Entry from SA and into Poepell’s corner requires South Australia Desert Parks pass. Camping in the QLD section requires a QLD parks camping permit.

The CLC permit can through very last minute. If we didn’t receive this we would have had to adjust our route. Luckily it was fine.

Australia is big….

Really big. Our plan was to start from Mt Dare to cross the desert, however just getting to Mt Dare from Melbourne is 23 hours of driving and 1,948km. To assist with this we decided to travel a week earlier than expected to Adelaide and start journey from there. This still left 1,237km and 15 hours driving which we split into two - stopping at William Creek over night.

On the way back we spent some time in Longreach to check out the Qantas museum and give ourselves some recovery time. Then Cunnamulla, Griffith followed by arriving at our home in Melbourne. This totalled 2,627km’s from Birdsville.

The crossing

Much like the CSR, the real challenge in these journey comes to preparation. If you nail your planning, packing and other prep work, the journey itself is uneventful and breeze. Take your time on all the dunes and don’t try to push yourself or the equipment.

We had a good idea from other peoples crossings what to expect and a good idea from our own previous journeys what works for us. We didn’t change much of our load out from the CSR which made prep super simple for us. Not much in the way of new equipment or requirements. The middle of the desert isn’t the place where you want to experiment.

The dunes are so large and long and it’s impossible to express their size purely in a photo

I was amazed about how different the dunes were between the lines and how they changed as we progressed east. For the most part we just crawled up each dune. There were maybe 4-5 dunes (including “big red”) where we needed to use a little bit of momentum to get over - the rest we could do at very low speed. This protects our car, makes for a comfy ride and prevent further damage to the track.

Surprisingly Eyre Creek had completely dried by the time we arrived so we didn’t require any water crossings this trip!

‘Big Red’ is the final dune of a typical Simpson Desert crossing. 30ish meters tall this dune is one of the hardest to cross, but technically not very challenging when approached carefully. It’s probably best to try crossing this dune like you would usually would the first time to get and understanding of the challenge before making adjustments.

You’ll soon realise that crawling over isn’t viable for ‘Big Red’. Air down. Right down. Most vehicles will be fine down to like 8 psi, so don’t be afraid to drop those tyre pressures down to 12 or even 10. The top is very soft, you won’t rock around in wombat holes at the top so once you get passed the corrugated sections just put your foot down. The top is flat so you’ll be fine at the top.

I tried a few different configurations for the car (have some fun and do some laps). I found that traction control has zapping a bit of energy at the top - turning this entirely off helped a lot with some of the harder approaches. Diff locked, 4low, gogogo.

Weather

It turns out that while we expected fairly cool evenings and mornings the desert had other ideas. Many towns around the Simpson desert broke their hottest August temperature records. Our extra blankets weren’t used and rarely did I need to wear my hoodie. The middle of the days were extremely hot, as such we used that time for mostly travel. Even lunch breaks were brief. Unlike the CSR with wells and trees - there was very little shade.

Fuel

We used the final CSR fuel consumption readings to calculate our expected fuel usage (22.8l/100km). We rounded up to the nearest jerry can - this meant full tank + 4 jerry cans. We had some extra carrying capacity so took an additional 2 jerry cans just in case. 6 in total. Four of these were stored in the vehicle and 2 on the roof.

Priority was to get the roof jerry cans off, so as soon as fuel tank had room these went inside. You want the roof rack as light as possible as the forces applied when hitting wombat holes at the top of dunes are significant. Many people crossing the Simpson have stories of roof racks breaking and to prove the point some travellers we came across had just that happen. Most of their fuel was stored on the roof rack.

Using the final CSR fuel consumption readings were pretty much spot on for the Simpson. 204 litres over roughly 950km = 21.4l/100km.

But our story about fuel doesn’t end here. It seems that the fuel we picked up back in Adelaide had some sort of contamination. The differential pressure sensor triggered on the fuel filter just past Dalhousie on the French line. We packed two fuel filters as we are well aware of the risks of filling up from jerry cans. The thing is though that the fuel filter warning had come on before we had emptied any jerry cans.

The light is only a warning, you’d typically just get it sorted as part of the next service. We tend to ignore this warning as working on the fuel system in a dusty environment in the middle of desert can be risky. We continued on without noticing much and in Birdsville replaced the filter - without clearing out the housing.

It wasn’t long however until the fuel filter warning came on again and eventually the same problem - fuel rail pressure preventing the car from accelerating quickly. We replaced the filter again. As we replaced bad fuel with good fuel the problem started occurring much further apart. At this stage we think we are mostly clear of the issue, however expect to go through a few more filters as the final crap works its way through the system.

Other faults

We had traction control fault occur several times. The timing of this aligned with when the HF APRS radio transmitted. Tightening up the sand flag antenna and adjusting the feed line seemed to resolve this mostly.

Upper control arm ball joint boots seem to be oozing grease. These might be over packed or some other issue - still needs to be investigated.

Drivers side CV boot seems to be leaking grease. This also needs to be investigated - an obvious hole or puncture couldn’t be spotted this time.

Food

Something new for us this trip is my decision to eat entirely Vegan. Geordie being extremely supportive in this decision mostly ate the same meals as myself as we don’t like to cook two different things. An amazing side effect of this is that vegan produce often can be stored warm and has long shelf lives. This left our fridge/freeze much more empty than typical allowing us to freeze some bread and have plenty of room for cold drinks. Next time I might consider packing some ice-creams.

Some of the meals we had were:

• Tacos
• Nachos
• Spaghetti
• Rice
• Wraps
• Pancakes
• Bagels
• Burgers

None of these meals are vegan specific but since most of the core ingredients come in tins (veggies, beans, jackfruit, lentils) packing became a breeze.

Car to car wifi

Another interesting addition was Rusty’s Starlink. While I don’t see myself signing up to Musk’s service anytime soon I was very impressed with how well it worked. The dish was mounted flat on their roof rack and it was able to be used while moving.

Geordie came up with the idea of setting up a point to point wifi link between the two cars. This worked well when we had near line of sight (dropping past a dune or two meant that the signal would be lost but would quickly recover when the other vehicle reached the top of the dune) and provided internet throughout our journey.

An interesting side effect is that we could use ping -A to create an audible alert noise whenever we dropped out of range. A useful indicator to know if we were getting too far ahead and need to slow down.

A future experiment might be car to car messaging/warning service.

Tent rope lights

Finally one other little addition from an unlikely source. I bought some “Fishing rod lights” for another project that didn’t work out. These glow a nice green and red light and last an entire night. I placed these on the ropes on our swag which prevented tripping on them. Something I’m extremely good at doing.

it’s not that bright in person!

Photos

That’s about it for my write up. I’m almost certain I’ve forgotten to mention a bunch of things - this adventure contained so much. If I remember anything I’ll be sure to make a follow up post here.

In the meantime if you wanted to check out some of the pictures I took of the journey I’ve uploaded them to flickr.

I’ve decided to publish my journal on the CSR trip - a roughly 1,800km journey through outback Western Australia. There are no services (phone, fuel, towns) with the exception of Kunawarritiji roadhouse which provides a basic store, water and fuel. The route is almost entirely sandy dune crossings with some rocky sections. It’s deemed one of the toughest off-road trips one could adventure on.

Before we begin though I think it’s important to recongise that like most modern Australian history, it’s plagued with racist, violent and inhumane treatment of Australia’s land owners. Cannings treatment of the indigenous people is inexcusable and this trip is not about remembering Cannings legacy. Throughout my journals I’ll be referring to the CSR in acronyms only. Rusty (a traveler in our convoy) suggested it be renamed “Corrugated Stock Route”.

It’s also important to note that the places we visited to the best of our knowledge are accessible under our permits for the time, however certain sites open and close over time.

So if it’s not about remembering Canning, what is this trip about?

Completing the CSR for me serves several purposes. The most important being worry free. Once you enter the CSR you are completely offline. To an extent world events can’t even stop you. Even if they close the CSR while your on it, you likely wouldn’t know until you finished it. It’s also not a short trip - with 1,800 km to travel (though we did about 2,030km with the side trips we added) and only being able to do a ~100-200km a day it provides plenty of time to stop worrying about everything else in the world.

The next important thing is exploring Western Australia. I’ve spent probably the least amount of time in this state and the CSR seems like the best way to see some of the best that Western Australia has to offer.

Finally there’s a technical pursuit. Can our car, equipment, radios and even ourselves hold up to the challenging environment.

How do you even?

This post most certainly isn’t going act as a how-to, but I think it’s worth mention some of the technical requirements of this trip to give an idea of the scale and planning required.

Most of doing the CSR is about logistics. Driving the CSR is the easy part, the prep work for the CSR is the hard part. If your not prepared it’s easy to loose your car or even your life out there.

Fuel

The most important is probably fuel. Leading up to the trip we did many smaller trips with similar terrain as the CSR. This gave us a rough idea of fuel usage in sandy dune covered tracks. Naturally we added some buffer to this and came up with 138L on board tank + 7 jerry cans (140L). Think about where you’d store 7 jerry cans on your car. Now work out how much weight your car can carry (GVM).

Water

Water is also important! There are two problems with water - how much to store and how to use well water. The CSR has many restored wells that you can use along the trip. Most of these are fine to drink after boiling or you can use something like an MSR Guardian to filter the water. We decided to carry roughly 80L of water and rely of filtering some well water along the way.

Food

For the first few days you can eat your normal camping meals with perishables (bread, salad, eggs, veggies) but eventually you’ll run out or they’ll go bad. We have a Engel fridge/freezer, so we ended up freezing a lot of meat and cheese. A lot of produce can be found in cans - like peas/corns/carrots and potatos. The biggest problem though with food is storing it all. You need to keep a buffer of food if you get stuck. We ended up with about 4 weeks of food, and storing it all was challenging. One of our storage tubs ended up being filled mostly with corn chips. You also need to be able to cook it! That means bringing all your required cooking equipment, stove, gas bottle.

Rusty’s setup was very different from ours - 30 frozen meals, a freezer, and a microwave running off an inverter and battery system. Pretty jealous of this setup.

Communications

Number one requirement of this trip is packing a PLB. There is no cell service out here, if someone is in a life threatening emergency this is the best chance of survival.

For non emergencies though, sometimes it’s good to keep in touch with people to let them know your ok. We have APRS on HF radio to let people track where we are, and a scheduled HF contact. The scheduled HF contact serves to talk about the trip and less so about world events happening - so even though you have a way of talking to the rest of the world, it doesn’t shatter that disconnected feeling.

We also used WinLink for short messages to friends and family and send compressed pictures to Twitter for fun.

Rusty also has a Garmin InReach which allows for GPS tracking, short messages and weather updates (though I don’t trust the weather updates out here as BoM just has this listed as one big “Northern Interior” region which covers most of the state)

Waste disposal

Think about all the waste you create when you prepare a meal. Tins, glass bottles, wrappers. So many little things. There are no bins on the CSR. Nowhere to dump rubbish. Everything you take in you must take out. Some stuff you can burn - like paper boxes - but you end up having to carry a lot of rubbish. We have a canvas rubbish bag that fits over our spare tyre - even with this we are careful not to generate too much waste.

Camping meals

If we take what we learnt about above meals, water, and waste. Think about cooking some Rigatoni pasta. We have to store a large packet of pasta, taking up valuable space, to cook it we need a large amount of water, we need enough gas to boil the water and our pasta sauce likely comes in a glass jar.

While pasta makes for a great easy camping meal, it makes for a terrible CSR meal.

Getting there and back

Just travelling to the CSR from Melbourne is a journey in itself. We spent 3 days just to get to Wiluna, the start of the CSR, and we’ll have travelled even more getting back.

Should I read your journals?

Short answer. I don’t know. They are fairly brief descriptions of what I found interesting, how I felt and what we did that day. It doesn’t cover everything, and shouldn’t be treated as some sort of travel guide.

I’ll include a couple of photos that I took along the way with each post, so even if you don’t find the text that interesting, you might enjoy the photos.