I mentioned in this previous post that we would start walking through the Hamilton Valley on days 5 and 6 of the camel trek. The promise was that the creeks in the valley would mean that this area would be greener than the extremely dry pastoral landscape of Mt Freeling Station that we had walked through in the previous days. The Bureau of Meteorology classifies the climate of this region as a desert climate characterised by hot and persistently dry seasons.
It turned out that walking through the Hamilton Valley pretty much meant us slowly making our downstream of a very dry Hamilton Creek: making our way through and around the malaleucas (White Tea-tree) that were growing in the creek bed. Walking the creek bed was the camel way, as the camels do not like going up and down hills. They panic going down a slope.
Basically we were roughly following the footsteps of Warren Bonython, who had walked the Flinders Ranges from end to end. His 1971 book Walking the Flinders Ranges is an account of his epic 1967-1968, 1011 kilometre trek along the Flinders Ranges from Crystal Brook in the south to Mt Hopeless, which marks the end point of the northern Flinders Ranges. In 1840, the explorer Edward John Eyre climbed a low ‘haycock- like’ peak on the plains and described the scene as ‘cheerless and hopeless’. He turned away and beat a hasty retreat to the south.
Bonython had subsequently proposed an extension of the Heysen Trail from Parachilna Gorge in the central Flinders Ranges to Mt Babbage in the northern Flinders Ranges. This proposed extension is no longer on the Heysen Trail agenda, but it remains an option for wilderness walkers. In this region you can walk for 10 days or more and not meet anyone. The group had a copy of Bonython’s book and we read the relevant sections each evening.
The Long Road to the North 
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