Michael Browning•26 Oct 2017

FEATURE

Travel: Gary Junction Highway

Our least-travelled major highway is perhaps the best

The Tanami, Oodnadatta, Birdsville and Strzelecki Tracks; the Gibb River, Kalumburu and Great Central Roads..

Most serious remote area RV travellers have ticked these great unsealed Outback highways off their bucket list. It’s not just the adventure they offer the intrepid; in most cases they’re the most direct links to significant and historic places.

But the Gary Junction? If ever there was a road less travelled that deserves to be in this company, this and its feeder roads that link the Pilbara with Central Australia, is it.

Explosive beginnings

Built by the legendary Len Beadell in the early1960s as part of a network of roads

for the Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, South Australia, the road in its original form ran 1350km from Liebig bore in the Northern Territory to Callawa Station in Western Australia and was named after Beadell's only son Gary.

Its original purpose was to allow scientists road access to the trajectory of rockets fired from Woomera as they passed over the most remote parts pf Central Australia on their way to splash down in the Indian Ocean off 80-mile Beach.

On present day maps, it’s depicted as running from the Tanami Road (Narwietooma Station) turn-off to Gary Junction, just east of

the Canning Stock Route, a distance of 852km.

However, the road forms the major part of the road connection between Alice Springs and the remote Pilbara town of Marble Bar, so many people today refer to the entire route as the ‘Gary Junction’. This isn’t to be confused with Beadell’s separate ‘Gary Highway’, which runs 400km north-south and connects the Aboriginal settlement of Warburton on the Great Central Road to Kunawartiji, where it intersects the Canning Stock Route at ‘Gary Junction’.

Confused? Well, while this is important historically, for the purpose of this story we’ll call the entire road from the Tanami to Marble Bar the ‘Gary Junction’. Someday, when the marketing people discover it, they should call it the Len Beadell Way.

Hidden highway

The benefits of taking this direct route west from the Red Centre to the fattest part of the West Australian coast, are obvious.

Alice Springs and its associated attractions of the West MacDonnell Ranges and Uluru are on every Australian travellers’ itinerary, while WA’s Coral Coast with its magnificent World Heritage-listed Ningaloo reef, rival’s Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef for tourist interest.

Most people fly from Alice to Broome, take a tour or rent a 4WD, but the Gary Junction is the most direct road route to the reef that stretches down the Coral Coast south of Exmouth.

What’s more surprising is that the ‘Gary’, in my opinion, is a much more picturesque road than the Tanami or even the Great Central and when we travelled it in August this year, its worst sections were not as bad as those we encountered on the Gibb, Kalumburu and Cape Leveque road.

We travelled the road from West to East to complete a 14,500 North Kimberley, Coral Coast and Kimberley trip, appropriately towing our purpose-built Trakmaster Pilbara Extreme 15ft off-road caravan.

Named after this remote and particularly harsh part of Australia, the Pilbara was perfectly equipped for this terrain, with tandem axle airbag suspension for a smooth ride,

a 200AH Enerdrive Lithium battery fed by a bank of three 150W roof-mounted solar panels and a 1600W combi inverter. It also carried 182 litres of fresh water with a separate 82 litre grey water tank to avoid us leaving any trace.

Taking the short cut

For us, the ‘Gary Junction’ was a short-cut to Alice Springs and back home to Southeast Queensland. We could have spared ourselves the 1500km it entailed by heading back up the bitumen towards Broome and tracking back around the Great Northern Highway to Kununurra, Katherine and then south on the Stuart, but that meant re-tracing some of our wheel-tracks and adding thousands of kilometres to our trip. So, we took the plunge.

As is common in the Outback these days, everyone ‘front of house’ in any service industry is a backpacker with very limited local knowledge and locals prefer to fly rather than trek large distances on unmade roads. So, it’s difficult to get accurate knowledge of road conditi8ons and what lies ahead.

When planning such a trip, your best and most up-to-date advice usually will come via fellow travellers and their posts on the many caravan and 4WD forums. In the case of the Gary Junction, there wasn’t a lot of information about, quite simply because relatively few people take their caravans across it.

This was born out when we saw just two on the road during nearly four days– a large tandem-axle Bushtracker going in the opposite direction and an off-road, single axle model minus a wheel by the roadside.

Permits required?

As the road passes by and through several Aboriginal communities, some permits are required. The

Central Lands Council’s website advises that one is required to travel the Gary Junction Road between the WA border and Papunya, 104km west of where it joins the Tanami Track, while a second permit is required for the road’s WA section.

Both can be obtained fairly easily online, but we were never asked to show one and nor have any other Gary Junction travellers we have spoken to.

The only really daunting part of our trip was the cluster of threatening warning signs that confronted us as we left the bitumen, about 257km east of Marble Bar, where it becomes the well-formed, but unsealed Telfer Mine Road.

Not only did they advise us we were entering a remote area with gravel roads and wandering stock, but that we could expect to find no water, fuel or medical assistance on the road ahead. This advice was incorrect on all three points.

Ignore the signs

For a start, both diesel and unleaded fuel is available at the many Aboriginal settlements along the road – Punmu, Kunawarritji. Kwirikurra, Walungurru, Mt.Liebig and Papunya – although there’s a bit of price gouging going on.

Medical facilities are located at all Aboriginal settlements and water is available freely both on the Telfer Mine Road and at Well 33, 4km north of where the road crosses the Canning Stock Route.

Having said that, you would be foolish to embark on the trip from Marble Bar to either Papunya (or Glen Helen Gorge if you enter Alice Springs via the West MacDonnell Ranges, as we did) without enough fuel to last you up to 650km and full water tanks in your caravan. You never know when fuel supplies run out, or a well runs dry!

Fuel is unquestionably expensive, so we set off with some cash in our pockets and the 82.3 litre tank in our Land-Rover Discovery 3 and two 20 litre jerry cans topped up at Marble Bar, where the price of diesel at the time was around $1.45 per litre.

We then refuelled the Disco at Punmu, where the pump price was $3.00/litre (but we did a lot better for cash) and we topped up again at Kunawarritji, where the non-negotiable pump price was a horrendous $3.40/litre.

But to save money, we added our two jerry cans before refuelling again at Papunya, where diesel was a much more reasonable $2.00/litre, then finally at Glen Hellen Resort, where the price was a not-much-lower $1.79/litre. If you’re travelling in a Toyota Prado or LandCruiser with a big sub-tank, you’ll get out of it lighter.

One important thing to note is that most of these operate in conjunction with local stores and are provided for the communities, not travellers. So, the pumps can not only be hard to find, but if you arrive out of shop hours, you’ll just have to wait until they re-open.

Scenic route

The real surprise was the condition of the road and the ever-changing scenery.

Travelling west to east, it all starts out well. The Telfer Road is well maintained to handle the road trains that service the mine, but it becomes progressively rougher after the mine road peels off right about 110km after the bitumen ends.

From then on, the road changes continually, broadening to a wide, well-graded fine gravel road like those you find on much of the Great Central Road further south, but narrowing to a one-lane, sandy track, or a hard, stony road at other times.

Yet while it can be a bit corrugated in parts, it was not a ‘caravan breaker’ at the time we drove it, although conditions in the Outback change constantly.

Admittedly, we were well prepared. Our Trakmaster rode softly on its airbag suspension and we chose from the outset to set its tyre pressures without too much bag in their walls to deal with potential corrugations and stony surfaces.

So, while we would have run around 2psi lower on a sandy road (like the Cape Leveque Road), we set the caravan’s tyres and those on the front of the Disco at 24psi cold and the Disco’s rear tyres at 27psi and monitored their pressure and temperature build-up via our windscreen-mounted tyre pressure monitor.

This worked well and we had no tyre issues at all for our entire 14,500km Kimberley trip, that included the Gibb, Kalumburu, Cape Leveque and Gary Junction roads.

Free camping fun

We free-camped each night on the Gary Junction and there are plenty of opportunities to get well off the road, whether on long grader scrapes or in gravel pits if you’d rather not see bright lights late at night. You’re unlikely to, as the road is very lightly trafficked by day and even less so after dark.

In fact, the absence of traffic, floodways, dips and curves in the Telfer/Gary Junction roads allowed us to maintain quite high average speed while driving sensibly.

We never went over 75km/h on even the best sections, but we set our speed to maintain the smoothest ride over the most corrugated sections that we encountered.

This ‘iron out’ technique worked out at around 65km/h and allowing for the bitumen at the start and the sealed road we used from Glen Helen Resort to Alice Springs, we averaged 67km/h from Marble Bar to Alice.

It sounds reckless, but it wasn’t. At the same time the Discovery used an average of 15.9 litres/100km towing the 2.75 tonne (laden) Trakmaster, so we travelled quite frugally too.

Pre-trip tips

If you’re thinking of travelling the Gary Junction, here are some things you should do:

• Check out as many caravan or 4WD forums as you can in advance to keep abreast of local road conditions.

• Purchase and study Hema’s invaluable Great Desert Tracks maps, that list all the community telephone numbers and fuel opening times.

• Apply for any Aboriginal permits early if you’re seeking them.

• Ensure you have at least 650km of fuel range.

• Carry plenty of water and top up when available.

• Ensure your tyres are in good condition, as new as possible (more tread depth) and are set at the optimum off-road pressure (which may be different to what we used)

Travel: Gary Junction Highway

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