Date of Adventure about 2 February 2025 to about 5 February 2025
Israelite Bay is a relatively isolated bay not too far east of Esperance. If you look at the map, the drive from Esperance to Boyatup is tarmac or graded dirt. Then it turns a lot more difficult.
At the start of the rough track, I dropped tire pressures to about 22 psi and started on the deep sand. As long as I was in the sand, I could keep a speed of close to 40 kph. You’ve got to keep moving in that sand or you’re sure to bog. But a bunch of the drive was really rough corrugations. Big enough that I couldn’t drive fast enough to skim across the top. And the track is narrow and winds enough to make high speeds pretty dangerous. Unfortunately, videos with an action cam are automatically corrected a bit for bounce and jerking so you can’t appreciate what it is really like driving this track. But you can get some idea.
But in some ways the scariest part of the drive in came towards the end. I was following tracks that had been set by earlier drivers coming into the bay. They ended up along the edge of a salt lake. These are notorious for looking solid on the surface but being really soft and muddy underneath. So if you get out on one and break through it can mean bogging and serious difficulty getting out. So I had to cruise along the edge, hoping for the best, until I found a place to turn around. Then I was able to drive back along the edge and over a small dune to a safer track.
Starting the drive in, there’s plenty of official warnings. The dieback mentioned is a disease that kills the native plants and is terribly destructive. I’ve seen lots of warnings about it and some places even have places to scrape your shoes off before hiking.
And, there’s a major washout along the road. Well marked with a “detour”. It’s pretty indicative of the kinds of problems caused by rain on some of the outback tracks.
So the drive was somewhere between 40 kph in sand and 15 kph on the corrugations and took a couple of hours. It was an interesting drive and well worth doing. It had been windy for a long time so it was good to find a campsite that was well protected. In the bay area there are a huge number of campsites, kind of like this one.
In the three days I spent camped here I saw 3 vehicles drive by. I was camped pretty close to the main trail that leads from the track in to the ruins and other campsites. Never talked to anyone. This is a really pretty bay but not exactly a swimming beach. The water is cold and lots of seaweed. And the whole time I was there was pretty windy. I only had a few opportunities to get the drone up for a bit of overview.
There are a number of ruins in the bay, including a long abandoned jetty.
I never did figure out what they were shipping from here.
There are several ruins in the general area. One set of ruins includes a structure, I hesitate to call it a building, that is clearly occupied at some times. This isn’t a “National Park” in the sense that I doubt if this is a caretaker’s cabin.
There was a telegraph station in Israelite Bay. It was clearly a pretty big deal because the main structure is large and impressive.
Like a lot of these remote ruins of telegraph stations, mine areas, and homesteads; there are a couple of small graveyards. I spent a large part of one morning just walking the area and checking out the graveyards. My maps indicated other single gravesites but I couldn’t’ find them. I’m not sure if the map is wrong or they are just so overgrown and hard to find.
The last thing I’ll mention about Israelite Bay is that there is a small lake area, pretty close to where I camped, that is really pink. It must be the red algae that seem to be relatively common in these salty lakes in Oz. Still photos just don’t show it at all well and the wind was usually strong enough to make drone flying impossible but I did manage to get a bit of video of it. I’m not sure why, but I find these salt lakes and salt flats (what we would call playas in the Western US) really interesting. I see them all over and will have to make a point of taking more photos and posting them.