Date of Event 19 October 2024
I’ve made it to pretty close to the tip of Cape York. The travel has gotten a lot more interesting and it’s time for a little discussion of the overall situation. It’s the very end of the season up here and that’s good news. Not many people on the road or people in the campgrounds. It’s getting hot and in less than a month the cyclone season will be starting up. My last post was at the Hann Crossing and stuff has happened since then. I spent several nights free camping by the river just north of Coen. It’s been a little hard to decide exactly where to camp. I’m trying to avoid major campgrounds so the first night I spent in a kind of pull off on the PDR rather than go into the Moreton Telegraph Station. The next day, when I pulled in, they weren’t all that friendly. It’s pretty clear that things are closing down. The guy cooking at the Archer River Roadhouse said that he would only be around for about 3 weeks because he had to get his caravan out of the area before rains started. I stopped at Archer River because it’s supposed to have fantastic burgers. It was pretty good but not that fantastic. I’ve been stopping at most of the Roadhouses and other points along the way.
My plan was to drive to the road that goes from the PDR down to Gunshot Creek and camp there. But I had a stroke of luck. At that intersection a Ranger was checking out his truck and I talked to him for 10 minutes or more. He told me that the campsites along the Old Telly were going to be kind of shitty…literally. Apparently, people don’t dig catholes and there’s lots of toilet paper hanging around. He said to go on to Fruitbat Falls and camp at Eliot Falls. He also said to spend time north of the Jardine River because it’s beautiful. So that’s what I did. Fruitbat Falls are famous and the road in is pretty simple.
Not sure why, but I decided not to swim in Fruitbat and then a bunch of guys showed up and kind of took my urge away. So I went on down the road to Eliot Falls. There is a bad spot at Scrubby Creek and I’ll try to put up the video of my return crossing below. Camped for 3 nights at Eliot. It’s a National Park campsite so you’ve got to get a permit. I didn’t realize that until I got there so I had to set up Starlink in the parking area to get internet to register. It’s a pretty good campground and because the real season is over it was sparsely populated. I managed to get in a couple of soaks in the creek.
While at Eliot, I spent a lot of time trying to learn something about WordPress as a way to write a better blog. I think I mentioned that I don’t like the way that Blogger allows me to mix text and photos or to resize the photos. So far I don’t think I’ve learned much. I don’t think WordPress is really that difficult but I really haven’t gotten there yet. So, I’ll continue this blog and try to learn more in the next couple of days.
Here's a video of crossing the creek at Stubby. I've got to learn how to narrate a lot better and edit a bit more but I'm just going to leave it. I was checking out the route when the two utes drove up and they went through first. It doesn't look too bad in the video but it was a little tough. I should have set a camera up on the other side and gotten footage of all three of us going through. Well, what the hell, it's a learning process. I still don't know what I'm doing here.
Basically that’s the end of my travelog for today. You’ll have to tune in later to see some of the interesting things I’ve noted in the last week. But here’s one that I found really curious. I’ve been driving on gravel, red dirt roads for a while now. In places they are prett corrugated. So, early on I decided to drop my tire pressure by a bit. I only dropped 10 psi from 45 to about 37. It did make a big difference. If the road was consistently corrugated I’d probably drop more pressure but there are places that are pretty smooth and then I’ll hit 10 or 20 km of tarmac.
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