payton abandoned his little family in early may for 2 1/2 weeks to go sample the fitzroy river in northern western australia and the daly river in the northern territory. nova and i visited the wildlife park and took bubble baths...
here's what payton did...
Its all boiled down to this. I've been to school for 26 of my 32 years of existence, and hold a couple advanced degrees - none of which is much help as I am helping Allistair rewire the govenor of the Jetranger, along the banks of a crocodile infested river in one of the more remote places on the global map. She'll be right.
It was a wild and wooly trip. 3000 km of outback tracks in behind the windshield of our trusty Cruiser. 1000 km of river travel from a trusty(?) Jetranger helicopter. We covered a good portion of Kimberly plateau, and sampled along the majority of one of its longest and most important river systems. It was amazing on a personal and professional level to work on such a large river system with essentially no white fella development.
It's a trip working in the north of Australia trying to conduct a scientific sampling trip in an area where the traditional owners have a culture ~60,000 years old, which embraces a paradigm that is um... the complete opposite from a western scientist's trying to push a very complicated, remote field sampling trip through in a short amount of time. Very cool, however, to meet some locals, and get a bit of feel of their world. The oldest continuous culture in the world - by a long shot. You got to respect.
The Kimberly is a beautiful area, reminds me a bit of Utah blown up to the size of Alaska and set in the sub tropics. As long as your there in the early dry season its paradise. After that it turns to a very hot hell, which then becomes submerged in a deluge making all travel impossible. Sampling was good and fun, but the details are only cool if you're a geek and therefore not cool by definition. After a hell of a trip in Northwestern WA it was time to catch a flight over Darwin, to sample the mighty Daly River in the Northern Territories...
We sampled the Daly via boat. A small, flat bottomed metal boat (or tinnie in Australian). I might mention here that the Daly River has one of the world's largest crocodile populations. It was a very small tinnie.
Now I've been on a river or two. In some respects traveling up and down the Daly was a lot like those other rivers I've been on, except that we generally didn't have a shot gun on board, and this one was not for shooting pidgeons or ducks. Oh yea, and this river had lots of animals which would like to eat you.
Crocodiles aside, it was cool to work on a truly tropical river. The river gage was amazing, the difference from the low water to high water mark on the gage was ~ 60m. To put that in perspective, flood stage on the Lochsa gauge in northern Idaho is around 5m. We sampled several springs which flow into the Daly and a number of bores in the area. Water allocations are just being drawn up on the Daly. Its different to be in there trying to help inform decisions on sustainable water budgets before the resource becomes over allocated.
After two and a half weeks in the field, I was tired and missed my girls quite a bit. It was time to finish my trip right across the "top end", and catch another flight to northeastern Queensland and catch up with ladies on the beach.
the kimberly, western aus
teeth marks from an estuarine croc (a "salty") - each hole is about as big as payton's thumb.
freshwater crocs, fitzroy r.
sampling the fitzroy r. via helicopter
no swimming! big crocs down there. fitzroy r.
in the jetranger, fitzroy r., wa
the iconic northwest tree - the boab
boab tree, wa
inspiration for the talking heads' "road to nowhere". kidding. the kimberly, wa
sampling a water well, fitzroy r. trip/the kimberly, wa
sunset on the fitzroy, wa
and on the daly river, norther territory - outside of darwin....
discharge from a spring on the daly r.
sampling on the daly r.
