South Australia 2019 – Day 5

The top of Spencers Gulf with the Mount Remarkable range in the background

Red Cliff Lookout visited by Matthew Flinders in 1802 on his circumnavigation of Australia

Butterfly on boronia at the Arid Lands Botanic Gardens

Eucalyptus krueseana, commonly known as book-leaf mallee

Ranges north of Port Augusta from the Stuart Highway

Ranges View Rest Area has distant views of the Flinders Ranges

For those keenly waiting on a toilet review, we visited a previous horror. Despite its modern exterior, this toilet was rated the worst on a previous 5 week road trip. It has improved from its gag-inducing past.

Some water in a salt lake

Sand dunes from the Stuart Highway

Lunar landscapes near Island Lagoon

Island Lagoon Lookout

The island in the salt “lagoon”

Elevated areas near Pimba with saltbush

Saltbush lamb – this one posed then quickly did a ewe-turn.

The power grid to Roxby Downs

Sand dunes on the road to Roxby Downs

We disturbed four wedge-tailed eagles on roadkill. What does the eagle say to his friends before they went back to their food? “Let us prey.”

A rock came off a gravel truck and nearly punched its way through our windscreen with cyclonic fracture lines.

Borefield Road on BHP leased land. This leads to the Arid Recovery Reserve which provides safe habitat for endangered arid land mammals.

Gibber plain at Arid Recovery on our walk through a small part of the huge reserve.

Red dunes at sunset

Quoll footprints

Bettong footprints

Red dune sunset

Olympic Dam Mine is one of the biggest in Australia wth over 500km of underground roads. It is the fourth largest copper deposit and the largest known single deposit of uranium in the world. Approximately 70% of the mine’s revenue comes from copper, 25% from uranium, and the remainder from silver and gold.