During the day-long shuttle ride from the coastal state capital of Adelaide to the start of South Australia’s Mawson Trail, we debated where the bush stopped and the outback began. But there was no doubt we were fully immersed in it when we arrived in the rust-coloured dust of Blinman, an ex-copper mining town where our group of seven friends increased the population by 20%.
We were beginning a 900km, two-week mountain-bike ride through some of Australia’s most epic prehistoric sites – the remains of an ancient seabed that 20th-Century explorer and geologist Douglas Mawson called “one great outdoor museum” due to the magnitude of easily accessible sedimentary rock and fossil exposure sites. (The trail has been named in his honour.)
As we left town and pedalled into the crumpled peaks and plunging gorges of Ikara – Flinders Ranges National Park – a classic example of what happens when two tectonic plates decide to butt heads over fault lines – the striking kaleidoscopic mountains looked familiar. Their bands of mauve ribbed with orange quartzite ridges have been widely captured by photographers; the iridescent dawn and pink dusk glows have been worshiped on the canvasses of renowned artists like Hans Heysen. And the way these ranges buckled and lifted has been immortalised in the creation stories of the traditional custodians of this land – the Adnyamathanha people – for tens of thousands of years.
Beyond that, we didn’t have the foggiest idea what we would stumble across within our first day’s 67km slog.