HELENA AND AURORA RANGES TRIP REPORT
25/03/16 – 28/03/16
Trip leaders: Peter and Judy
Participants: Ray C
25/03/2016
Lovely morning and 20 degrees we headed off to up Great Eastern Highway to our first stop at Merredin Dam for morning tea. We had a fuel stop in Southern Cross then onto Karalee Dam and Drain. Stone walls feed the drain into the dam. Lots of campers, being Easter were enjoying the day and children were swimming in the dam. After having a look around the area we had some lunch then continued on to Jaudi Station. When we arrived at what was going to be our first night camp at Jaurdi, we were surprised to find it was very busy with 21 vehicles from the 4WD Club of WA. We continued on down the track and found a nice quiet spot to spend the night.
26/03/16
As we were about to leave our first night’s camp it started to rain. We travelled to an old gold mine where there are a number of mine shafts which are very interesting in the way they were constructed. We pushed onto a working mine which has various pieces of equipment made from assorted old machinery parts and a number of diggings appearing to go back to pioneer days. The miner had a couple of caravans and a well kept kitchen attached to a sleep out and it looked quite comfortable. The rain continued to fall heavily and the tracks were awash with mud and water - like driving on an ice skating rink. After a couple of mishaps and getting bogged from sliding off the track, winching and Max Trax came in very handy. We had several occasions where it was necessary to get out, check the depth of the mud and water and make our own side tracks to continue on our way. We didn’t reach our second night camp on the top of the ranges as we had intended. We made camp just off the side of the track on higher ground in case the rain continued, which it did the next morning.
27/03/16
Next morning when we arrived at the track leading to the top of the Aurora Ranges, we were amazed that there was new signage stating you can no longer camp at the top of the hill. As we drove up the hill we scrambled over rocks to the top of the ranges to see if we could see the view. We stopped for lunch. There was a lot of misty rain and we were in the clouds, so we came back down and continued on to Olli’s Pizza Bar and several other interesting places on our trip. We made camp on the side of the road again as we thought there may be a problem getting across the salt lake, with all the rain we were having and the threatening skies ahead.
28/03/16
Next morning we pushed on down the track until we reached Elechbutting Hill. We had lunch and checked out Monty’s Pass walk trail through a tunnel in the rock caused by part of the rock shearing off. We also visited Wave Rock, very similar to the Hyden rock. After driving up to the top of Elechbutting Hill in our vehicles, we continued our journey to Beringbooding Rock and had a look at the 2 million gallon water tank. Being the Easter weekend, we expected to see more people around but the weather must have put people off.
We headed home along the back roads to Northam. The traffic was very light and we had very enjoyable trip
Thank you to Ray for making it a fun filled enjoyable trip.
Peter and Judy
