G'day
Explorers
I was not on a walk trail/track on
Mount Augustus or any other major land form anywhere here in the remote parts of Western Australia, but the end nearly came in the blink of an eye.
This all sounds rather dramatic, but what happened was utterly spectacular and simply hard to believe at the time.
I most often have the dash cam rolling when travelling the black top, but the local and regional scene is as mind destroying as the first nanosecond of a Rio Tinto's public apology for obliterating the Archeologically significant Juukan
Gorge caves which had a very significant and genuine timeline of 46000 years of Indigenous persons occupation ~ sadly the dash cam was sleeping.
Saturday's weather was an absolute shocker, strong gusty winds reaching 15 knots though temperatures were quite low, it was a sunny day for the most part, I know it was sunny because I could see the sun now and then through the wind driven dust of mining, so it was just nice to get the hell out of town and simply roost up somewhere on a shale bank in the watercourse of the mighty
Fortescue River, not a big day out and not a big deal, just stay away from the widow maker River Gums, just the wife and myself.
Some five hours after roosting up on the shale bank and collecting a few geological specimens, we headed back to town, just 8 kilometres away, then in the absolute blink of the eyes we nearly could have become another statistic of the Great Northern Highway via
Newman W A.
Had the big brown, hit the proverbial fan and all the grizzly aftermath been swept away, it would have possibly been my fault for being there at the time or just bad luck ~ something along those lines.
As I mentioned previously, it was a super windy day, on a very busy section of highway as we were going past an 'official' disassembly area where triple trailer road trains are de-trailered so they can access the bowels of industry in and around town, this crap goes on 24/7, which means the disassembly area is too small and the road train trailers are parked up on the sides of the main highway tar seal.
So as we are in the process of entering the left exit lane into town, when a full sheet of plywood gets lifted off an abandoned trailer and launches at high speed into the left rear corner of my Cruiser, luck has it there's only scuff marks on the panel work as the rear wheel and left rear spare on the carrier took the full impact.
These sheets of ply are in the order of 2.4mx1.2mx10mil, so they are a fair projectile.
A vehicle coming head on had the driver 'blessing' himself in some religious ritual thing, so called spiritual people do ~ I just swore in seven different languages, then I got told off for my linguistic skills.
So you just don't know when the grim reaper will come for you, maybe next time eh!
Safe travels : Joe
Shale bank