Mount Elizabeth, Silent Grove and Weather

Posted by efloow on August 25, 2015 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Mount Elizabeth (16-17 August) is another of the cattle stations with a spectacular gorge called Wunamurra and is the starting point for the Munja Track. The camping was just a paddock out the back with pretty average facilities. The most notable thing for us was how cold it was at night (down to 4 degrees) and the large bull who tried to share our pasta dinner and had us take refuge inside the camper!

After Bachsten we travelled to Silent Grove to see Bells Gorge (24-25 August). It was a pretty amazing site tucked under an escarpment with good facilities, but with people again which was a little confronting after the isolation of Bachsten. Bell Gorge was really picturesque and was the first waterfall that we saw with a reasonable amount of water flowing.

After here we travelled back East on the GRR to see Galvins Gorge and then onto 4 nights at the Australian Wildlife Conservatory Camp at Mornington before heading to Derby.

I haven’t really mentioned the weather yet beyond the fact that we rushed through the centre to avoid the cold nights. It seems like a good place to mention it now, as the two nights that we a spent at Mount Elizabeth and then Silent Grove (that were at either end of our trip to Bachsten Camp) marked a big change in the weather.

Since Darwin, the weather as been absolutely perfect. Day time temperatures have been a very comfortable 30-35 degrees with it dropping to 12-15 degrees overnight… comfortable sleeping with a light dooner! Although the sky’s were clear, it seemed that it was hard to get sunburnt (winter sun?). There was only one exception to this, and that was the two nights at Mount Elizabeth Station where it got down to 4 degrees…. back out with the winter woollies.

By the time that we left Bachsten and spent our two nights at Silent Grove it had changed dramatically, almost as if somebody had flipped a switch! The days are now increasingly humid at around 35 degrees. The nights still cool down but not nearly to the same degree (low to mid twenties) and everything in the morning is wet with condensation. We now sleep with all the flies (canvas windows) on the trailer open! Apparently this is very normal and marks the beginning of the build up to the wet season.

The other thing we were aware of was a lack of clouds since arriving in the tropics. This made Holly’s school assignment in which she had to write a weather report that included the cloud types and chance of rain a bit tricky! We all had a big celebration in mid August when a small pathetic cloud allowed us to finish the assignment.

It is also worth commenting on how dry it has been while we have been in the Top End. Last years wet was not substantial and most of the gorges and savannahs look drier now than they would normally at this time of year. They have even said that they expect Mitchell Falls to stop flowing this year for the first time in 25 years. Despite this we had a bizarre night with heavy rain on our last night at Mornington. It was the first time that they had rainfall in August since 2009! It was so heavy that they closed the roads the next morning and we could not start our trip to Derby until after the roads drier out.