#larapintatrail

I was woken up by the noise of somebody shuffling in the tent behind me. Wearily checking the time on my phone, I discovered it was 2.50am. What ungodly hour was this? I had been robbed of a full ten minutes of sleep before my alarm was due to go off.

There were thirteen of us in total. All rugged up in our sleeping bags as the central Australian overnight temperatures were finally beginning to drop. At 3am, we started emerging from our cocoons, blindly stumbling through the campsite, finding torches, getting changed, half packing, mostly yawning as we made ready for our pre-dawn ascent of Mount Sonder.

Coming in at 1380m, Mt Sonder is the Northern Territory’s fourth highest mountain with Mt Zeil taking top honours at 1531m which in turn is just another 7000m shy of Everest. It also marks the conclusion of the Larapinta Trail, a world famous walking track that starts in Alice Springs a couple of hundred kilometres back east. We were taking advantage of a mid-week public holiday and had driven out the evening before to the campground near the base so we could make our early start.

Piling in to the three vehicles, we drove the first few clicks to the day use car park and checked the map to make sure we didn’t begin with a wrong turn, although trying to find the start and one of the blue arrows that point the way over the full 234kms of the Trail was not quite as easy as hoped at silly o’clock in the morning. Once we’d established which way would take us up and not down into Redbank Gorge, we were on our way. It was 3.50am.

When I entered a GeoQuest race a few years ago, I’d had to buy a whole heap of compulsory equipment to satisfy their safety requirements. Grumpy then at the expense, the thermals have since come in very handy on the bitterly cold winter morning cycle rides to work, the Gore-Tex jacket a blessing on the rare occasion we get rain and the buff has saved me from heatstroke and my bald pate from sunburn more times than I care to remember. The head torch though, during my usual last minute packing back at home, nowhere to be found. As it so often seems, the one thing I actually needed is the one thing I could not source. Consequently, I’d grabbed the only light I could find which was some cheap NT Government freebie torch not much bigger than a AA battery. It’s fair to say that its ability to light up anything further than a few inches away is very, very, very limited. With a moonless sky above, even crossing the sandy, largely rockless river bed was proving a tripping hazard with that in hand. Luckily, with one other exception, the rest of the gang were not so ill-prepared and as we settled into a crocodile line once across the river and onto the narrow track, the light shining from those in front and behind proved more than sufficient for me to keep my feet.

The walk itself is around 8kms long to the summit. Under the cover of darkness, the views remain unseen and the route unknown. Every now again the up and up is punctuated by a short descent before climbing once more. One foot in front of the other, head down, just keep going. Kilometre markers pass by, time flies by. No distractions. Around the 7km marker there was an awareness of being on a ridge as the first glimmer of light far off on the eastern horizon teased a distinction between land and sky.

At 6.30am, the last few yards of the ascent to the flat, false summit as a line of tangerine orange extended horizontally across the skyline bringing the silhouette of the sister peak into full view. We had reached 1360m since the real summit of Mt Sonder sat 750m in front of us, the other side of a gully but deemed too unsafe to reach when the track was made back in 2002. Regardless, we’d reached the high point of our trek and waited for the sun to rise.

At 6.52am, the first rays of the days shot over the horizon and cast a mellow glow over the surrounds. They opened up the sheer majesty of the views below to the ranges, the gorges and the expanses in between and the lack of signs of humanity; no street lights, no roads evident, not even the one we came in on. The path of the dry Finke River and her tributaries instead carving their way through the arid landscape.

By climbing in darkness, there was no glimpse of the views to come and thus no expectation. As day broke, the slow reveal made the beauty of the vista so much more rewarding. After an hour or so of gawking and picture taking it was time to head back down. The sun now high in the sky and the descent providing the stunning panoramic views that had been hidden all the way up. Furthermore, the flies had yet to wake up and the heat of the day still to come. By arriving back at the start a touch before 9.30am, we had avoided all the miseries of day walking in central Australia. Watching trekkers at the base getting ready to start their climb, I think there was plenty of group satisfaction and smugness in knowing we had done it better than they would.

After a short drive back to camp, it was time for coffee and pancakes before packing up camp and heading back home to the Alice. Plenty of time left in the day to put my feet up, drift in and out of naps and reflect on a perfect morning. Every day the sun comes up and some of those days, I’ve watched it do so. This time though, surrounded by good friends and overlooking my southern NT homeland from high up in the MacDonnell Ranges, turned out to be the best dawn yet.