Wave Hill trees

Wave Hill trees
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

I went on a field trip out near Wave Hill station last weekend. These flowers were all over the place, and were pretty striking, though they bounced around an awful lot in the wind. Made for a lot of very blurry photos. This is nearby one of the sites where we placed dataloggers to track the temperature under translucent rocks. It's really a pretty area, and the night sky is amazing. The nearest town of any real size was Katherine - about 5 hours away - so the sky was very dark. And we were out there when the moon was still pretty small, so it was very dark. Great for stargazing. We were a bit worried before the trip because the weather records for the area showed that it had been quite cold there the previous week - down to about 5°C overnight (41°F), which is very cold for someone used to Darwin weather. Fortunately, it only got down to a comfortable 14°C, which is not much cooler than Darwin right now, and really beautiful weather for camping. And, since it's the dry season now, no chance of rain at all. Great stuff!

We had planned to cook using a camp stove, but there was a bit of a fire ring there, so we gathered up a bit of wood and dried grass and stared a camp fire. We were amazed at how quickly it went from a pile of kindling to a very hot fire. One match and the thing was blazing. Really gave me respect for how easy it is to get a grass fire going in this region. With all the extra rain we got late in the season this year, there seems to be a lot of fuel farther south than normal, so I wonder if there will be even more buring than usual this year, if that's possible. About 95% of the region gets burned each year as it is, so there isn't much room for more than that.