KYMCO out back on Cloncurry
Rick Huckstepp Adventure continued....
Rick Huckstepp is travelling around Australia with his trusty MXU 400 and is sharing his explorations to date!!!
Click to enlarge Well, we finally got back to Brisbane from the whirlwind tour of Victoria, South Australia and the northwest corner of New South Wales and the Kymco had certainly seen a diverse range of country side.
It was service time for the MSX400 and with that out of the way it was put back onto the bush trailer awaiting its next journey.
That was to start at the end of March with the destination being the Northern Territory.
With trailer loaded for an expected three months away from home we rolled toward Mount Isa.
I had timed my departure from Brisbane and factored in ten days for the trip. A couple of those I wanted to spend out back of the Isa to give the Kymco a run on some of the feral animals there.
That should put me onto the Daly River south of the Adelaide River township, right at the end of the wet season so I could fish the runoff; a time when all the floodwaters poor off the floodplains and one when the barramundi are biting their heads off!
Well Murphy’s Law is alive and well in aspects of my life and as we neared the Isa an unseasonal cyclone cranked up in the Gulf of Carpentaria and dumped another metre of rain on the watershed for the area I wanted to fish.
The Daly River had already been in flood; 13 metres over the river crossing at the township. Having subsided it was in ‘run off’ mode but the latest deluge pushed back up and over 14 metres and it broke its banks, causing a full evacuation of the area.
Sitting at Mount Isa I was in a quandary. Head back to Brisbane or head bush and sit it out. I chose the latter and found myself on the old gold fields south of Cloncurry.
With permission from the station owner to prospect and shoot I set up base camp which was to be our surroundings for the next fortnight.
The task of camp set up complete, the 400 was down the ramps and fuelled for its first run in this sometimes mountainous country.
With my Minelab GPX4500 metal detector across the handle bars on the gun rack I pushed south into the rocky mountains that surrounded camp.
I was well into the ranges and climbing mountain slopes that I would have had trouble walking up!
Boulders that would put a stop to two wheel drive travel were no match for the Kymco 4WD system which lifted me up and over those and the hundreds that were strewn across the craggy landscape.
Some of the creek crossings were no match for the quad either and it chewed up more than its fair share of sand in the bed of the Cloncurry River.
Did I find any of that yellow stuff?
Nope, none at all but that’s not a worry, just another excuse to go back and try again!
Click to enlarge