Grey Nomads

The road-train, stuck up to its multiple axels in the mud should have rung warning bells, but, as ever tenacious, I convinced Hubby to continue on. Given half a chance he would have done a u-turn and headed straight back to Winton. But onwards we pushed, sometime resorting to low range gears in 4-wheel drive just to maintain our slug speed momentum.

Finally we jack-knifed down the drive into Lark Quarry and arriving three and a half hours and 95 million years ago. The weather conditions on that day were similar to the one we experienced. The mud was wet and slippery. Thousands of small chook size carnivores and some slightly larger herbivores found themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place; the large expanse of water and a very large, very hungry, two tonne Carnosaur hell bent on making dinner out of them. Frozen in time by a freak coincidence, a period of dry wind blew a layer of sand and silt and over the deep prints. The ensuing years saw layer upon layer of sandstone cover and preserving the evidence until the late 1960’s when a hapless opal fossicker stubbled upon them by chance.

The helter skelter event of the panic-stricken hoards fleeing for their lives was immortalised in the dinosaur stampede scene in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. I wonder if our higgledy piggledy boot prints in the mud covered parking lot may be discovered 95 million years from today and some future palaeontologist may interpret our plight as having been pursued by some multi wheeled creature trying to trap us.

After extraditing ourselves from our mud encrusted vehicle we met our guide, Bill and were afforded a private guided tour as no more tourists turned up that afternoon. Hardly surprising after we were informed they had, unbeknownst to us, closed the road from Winton that morning. The guided tour was fascinating and Bill had an infectious enthusiasm for and vast knowledge of the subject of the dinosaurs of the region. He enjoyed a good chinwag and our extended time in his company was enjoyable.

As there was little chance of our 4 tonne rig climbing back up the driveway out of the quarry let alone getting through to Winton again that day we hankered down in the parking lot of Lark Quarry. We settled down for a cold night with extra blankets on and prayed for sunshine a brisk wind to dry the road in the morrow.

As luck would have it our prayers were answered and the stiff wind and sunshine the next day made the road back to Winton passable if not completely uneventful. It took two hours to get there and another two hours to wash the tonnes of mud off our vehicle and caravan. It’ll take another two years to get all the mud out of the sole of our boots.

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