A Gould's goanna and St Mary's Peak we are hiking to in 37*C ( 98.6*F ) heat!

Wilpena Pound is the biggest tourist attraction in the area. We have not spent much time there in the past for this very reason. But this time it was very quiet there due to the heat no doubt so we decided to do the biggest hike on offer.

Can get quite steep in places on the 21 km hike to St. Mary's Peak.

We started on the outside track which follows along the outside of the wall which was fairly flat and shaded. But there comes a point where you have to climb up the wall to the ridge top. Well this is rather abrupt and was quite hard work scrabbling over the rocks and up the ledges. This was made all the worse when you take in the fact it was 37*C or 98.6*F and lost the shade as well.

Getting closer now with Lisa climbing ahead. Views from the top above.

St. Mary's Peak is the highest point in the pound and affords brilliant views but means the climbing continues after reaching the ridge top. You can see from the shot above how much higher we still had to climb after reaching the top of the wall. But the reward was worthwhile when we finally stood up there.

Some skinks joining us for lunch and you can make out our track back through the pound.

We had planned to have our lunch up there but there was no shade whatsoever so we dropped down and sheltered beside a rock face. Had some very friendly skinks joining us too as they would jump from the rock face onto us and into the pack I was carrying. We then decided to make the walk even longer by hiking down through the middle of the pound for the way back. Figured it might not take much longer than scaling down the wall again and have more shade as well. But this was not to be the case as the ground was very rocky to start with as well as the scrub being too low to shade us at all. Had worse problems as we were running out of water so had to ration it until getting back. In all we did 21 kms in 7 hours which was better than the 9 hours suggested time let alone in the heat we had.

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