We had wanted to walk the Larapinta Trail for a long time before we finally made it to the Red Centre in July 2021. The Red Centre had been high on both of our bucket lists for as long as we could remember, and spending two weeks walking through the Tjoritja / West MacDonnell Ranges felt like the most fitting way we could think of to experience it.
Tell Your Trail had been running for about a year by then, and we had already designed the Larapinta Trail for our collection before arriving in Alice Springs. This would be the first time we walked one of our own designs from one end to the other, turning a route we had researched on a computer into places we would actually know.
We were also convinced we would write about the whole experience afterwards. We took hundreds of photos and filmed little updates along the way with exactly that idea in mind, but life changed direction rather quickly after the hike and somehow five years passed before we finally sat down to tell the story.
A week in Alice Springs, and a lockdown we did not plan for
We spent most of 2021 traveling around Australia and had always planned to give the Northern Territory proper time rather than just passing through. The Larapinta was already firmly on our wish list, so the main question was when we could fit it into the trip.
Because it is a desert hike, the time of year mattered. We considered June, July and August, eventually settled on July 5 to 18, and organized the rest of our travels around those two weeks.
We arrived in Alice Springs on June 28, giving us roughly a week to get everything ready, and then COVID decided to make the planning slightly more interesting. Only a few days before we were due to start, a 72-hour lockdown was announced while we still had our food drops to organize.
For a couple of days we genuinely did not know whether we would be able to get everything in place in time or whether our July 5 start would happen at all. Thankfully, the lockdown was lifted after 48 hours, which left us just enough time to finish the preparations.
At least the food side of things was much more organized than it had been on our Great Ocean Walk seven years earlier. Back then, our approach had basically been to buy a lot of food, put it into our backpacks and hope for the best, whereas this time we had a spreadsheet covering every day of the hike, the distance we expected to walk and what we wanted for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks.
From there we worked out how much we needed, bought everything and divided it between the different resupply boxes. For a few days the table at our caravan site disappeared underneath food, ziplock bags and labels, but there was a proper plan behind the chaos.
Once everything was packed, we spent a full day driving between the accessible resupply points along the trail and putting the boxes into storage. We first had to organize the key for the food-storage rooms through the Visitor Information Centre in Alice Springs, while the drop at Standley Chasm had to be arranged separately with them directly.
The resupplies meant we never had to carry more than around five days of food at once, although Maud’s fear of running out still managed to defeat even the spreadsheet and we ended up taking more than we needed. Our packs were much more sensible than on the Great Ocean Walk, though, at around 12 kilos for Maud and 16 for Jay, with most of the difference coming from the camera equipment and drone.
Starting from the other end
Most descriptions of the Larapinta run from Alice Springs towards Mount Sonder, but we decided to walk it in the opposite direction.
The main reason was flexibility. We had allowed ourselves enough time to add another day if we needed one, and walking back towards Alice Springs meant there was no remote pickup waiting for us at Mount Sonder on a fixed date. If something took longer than expected or we wanted to shorten a day somewhere along the way, we had room to adjust.
On July 5, a transfer took us from Alice Springs to Redbank Gorge, where we put up the tent before heading up Mount Sonder with one small daypack between us. We had brought the daypack specifically for this first part of the trail and later left it in our first resupply box so that we would not have to carry an extra bag for the remaining two weeks.
The walk to Mount Sonder was around 16 kilometers return, and from the summit we had our first proper view across the Tjoritja / West MacDonnell Ranges. After spending so long looking at the route on a screen, it was quite something to finally be standing there with almost two weeks of those ranges still ahead of us.
The full backpacks went on the next morning as we left Redbank Gorge for Rocky Bar Gap, and the difference was immediate. It was hot, there was very little shade and the pack weight took some getting used to. On paper the day was not supposed to be particularly difficult, but mentally it was much harder than we had expected, especially knowing that this was only the first proper day and almost two weeks of walking were still ahead of us.
By the time we reached Rocky Bar Gap we were tired, hot and extremely happy to take the packs off, although the campsite itself was beautiful and a night’s sleep made a considerable difference.
The following morning already felt much better. We headed towards Finke River, climbed up to Hilltop Lookout and found ourselves looking across the ranges in every direction with far more energy than we had had the afternoon before.
From there the trail dropped towards Finke River, where the route took us straight through the water and we ended up wading up to our knees before continuing towards Ormiston Gorge. By the time we arrived, a shower and our first food resupply were waiting for us, both of which were very welcome.
Some of the nights we still remember best
Leaving Ormiston meant loading several days of food back into the packs and carrying extra water because our planned campsite for that night did not have a water supply.
That campsite was Hermits Hideaway, an unofficial camping spot high on the ridge that became one of our favorite nights of the whole Larapinta. We shared the ridge with a few other hikers, cooked dinner and set an early alarm for sunrise the following morning.
The views were worth getting up for, with the ranges stretching out around us and Mount Sonder still visible in the distance behind us.
From there we continued towards Serpentine Chalet Dam through a beautiful valley with mountain ranges on either side. Towards the end, the route narrowed and involved a fair amount of rock scrambling to cross through the range to the other side, making the final part of the day considerably tougher and less enjoyable than the earlier walking.
The night at Serpentine Chalet Dam gave us another reminder of how quickly conditions could change in the Red Centre. Gusty winds came through camp for much of the night, and by morning a fine layer of red dust had found its way inside the tent.
The wind was still around the next day, although for once we were quite happy about it because it kept the temperature down. We climbed to Counts Point, where we could look back across the entire valley we had walked the previous day. Seeing all that ground stretched out underneath us made the distance feel much more real than simply reading the kilometer count in a guidebook.
When a short day became the right decision
By the time we reached Ellery Creek North, we had been walking for a week.
Our original plan had been to continue towards Rocky Gully so that the more difficult days ahead would be slightly shorter, but we arrived at Ellery Creek North at around 11:30 in the morning and immediately reconsidered.
The campsite was beautiful, the water was right there and we had an entire afternoon in front of us, so instead of pushing on simply because the itinerary said we could, we stayed.
We spent the afternoon by the water doing very little, knowing perfectly well that the decision would turn the following day into a much longer walk to Hugh Gorge. We would still make exactly the same choice again.
We left before seven the next morning with roughly 30 kilometers ahead of us. The night had actually been our first properly chilly one, but the cool start did not last and the day became one of the hottest of the entire hike.
Much of the route ran through a long valley with almost no natural shade, so we worked around the heat and used our ponchos as tarps whenever we needed a longer break. We had deliberately chosen ponchos that could be used this way, and with our hiking poles holding them up they gave us a small patch of shade when the landscape offered none.
We eventually reached Hugh Gorge at around 6:30 or 6:45 in the evening and put up the tent in the dark after one of the longest days of the trail.
When kilometers stopped meaning very much
By this point we had learned that the distance written in the guidebook only told part of the story.
The route out of Hugh Gorge over Razorback Ridge was only around 15 kilometers, but it came with an estimated walking time of roughly nine and a half hours. Once we were on it, the reason became obvious: loose rocks, scrambling, steep climbs and long ridgelines made progress considerably slower than the number of kilometers suggested.
Somewhere along the way we started talking about the difference between a normal kilometer and a Larapinta kilometer, because the final kilometer before camp seemed to take much longer than any kilometer reasonably should.
We also became fairly convinced that if a hill appeared directly ahead of us, the Larapinta would find a way to take us over the top rather than around it.
After a night at the Section 4/5 Junction, the next big section took us towards Standley Chasm via Brinkley Bluff. Someone had told us that on a clear day Mount Sonder could still be visible from the top, which sounded slightly unbelievable after ten days of walking.
We were lucky with the weather, and there it was on the horizon.
Seeing the mountain where we had started was both satisfying and slightly frustrating. We knew how much ground we had covered, yet the Red Centre had somehow managed to keep the starting point in sight for ten days.
The terrain down towards Standley Chasm was steep and rough enough that our feet were very ready for a break by the time we arrived. We were also ready for something other than food from our resupply boxes, and at the time the hamburgers at Standley Chasm had a bit of a reputation among Larapinta hikers. After days of trail food, sitting down to a proper hamburger did not disappoint.
We made the most of being there the next morning, starting slowly with a shower, collecting our next food resupply and repacking the backpacks before eventually leaving just after noon.
With around 14 kilometers to Jay Creek, we assumed the day would be relatively straightforward, but a good part of the route followed a riverbed covered in sand and loose pebbles. Every step felt slower than it should have, and what looked like a fairly easy day on paper turned into one of those sections we had slightly underestimated.
The final few days
Leaving Jay Creek, we had three days left for the final two official sections of the trail. The terrain was becoming gentler, and the weather finally started to behave more like the winter conditions we had originally expected.
The day out of Jay Creek was the first one that did not reach 20°C, which made the walking noticeably easier, and that night we stopped in a riverbed just outside Bond Gap for what became one of the coldest nights of the hike.
The following morning we continued towards Simpsons Gap. By then the landscape was becoming noticeably flatter and less rugged, but Simpsons Gap itself was beautiful enough that we were in no hurry to walk straight through.
Unlike many of the places we had passed over the previous two weeks, Simpsons Gap is easily accessible by road, so there were suddenly cars and other visitors around us. It felt busy after so many days surrounded mostly by hikers and empty landscapes, but we took a proper break, looked around and enjoyed the scenery before continuing towards Wallaby Gap.
That evening we put the tent up for the final time, knowing that the next morning Alice Springs was waiting at the other end of the trail.
We woke on July 18 with around 13.5 kilometers between us and the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. By then we were definitely looking forward to a shower, proper food and a comfortable bed, while at the same time feeling surprisingly sad that something we had planned for so long was down to its final few hours.
The approach to Alice Springs had a completely different feel from the ridges and gorges that had dominated most of the previous two weeks, particularly once we began following the old telegraph poles towards the Telegraph Station.
The Overland Telegraph Line was completed in 1872 and connected the south and north of Australia, linking the country with the international telegraph network. The Telegraph Station became an important center of activity in the Red Centre, and the settlement that developed around it eventually grew into Alice Springs.
Following those poles for the last kilometers gave the end of the trail a different kind of significance and felt like a fitting way to arrive back in town.
At around 12:15 we reached the Telegraph Station, with our own tally coming to 225 kilometers between July 5 and July 18.
By then we both desperately needed to pee, so one of the first pleasures of being back in civilization was using a proper flushing toilet again. We followed that with an ice cream and spent some time sitting at the Telegraph Station, resting our feet and enjoying the fact that we had actually finished the trail we had spent so long planning.
The official Larapinta was over, but the caravan park was still a few kilometers away. After giving ourselves some time to enjoy the finish, we put the backpacks on once more and walked back to the caravan park, where the lady at reception seemed genuinely surprised to see us. We had told her before leaving that we planned to walk the full trail in fourteen days, but she had apparently not been entirely convinced we would make it. Her reaction gave us one final little moment of amusement before we headed back to the caravan for a hot shower and properly brought the fourteen days of walking to an end.
What surprised us about the Larapinta
Looking back, some of the things we remember most strongly are not tied to one particular section at all.
We had packed for cold desert nights because our years living in Abu Dhabi had taught us how sharply temperatures can fall once the sun disappears, and everything we had read suggested that winter nights in the Red Centre could get properly cold.
Instead, much of the hike was considerably warmer than we expected. Several days reached the high twenties and many of the nights stayed warm enough that our sleeping bags were simply too hot, although the final few days eventually gave us the winter temperatures we had packed for.
The trail infrastructure also made a real difference. Most designated campsites had covered shelters where you could sit, cook and even sleep if you did not want to put up a tent, along with drop toilets and water tanks. The toilets often had toilet paper as well, which becomes far more noteworthy after enough days on a trail than it probably sounds sitting at home.
Some campsites had charging stations too, although several were not working while we were there, so we quickly learned not to rely on them. Water had been one of our biggest concerns before starting, but we never arrived at one of the maintained tanks and found it empty. Jay generally carried around three liters between water points and Maud around two and a half, which worked for us in the conditions we encountered.
One of the biggest surprises, though, was how alive the landscape felt. When you picture Australia’s Red Centre, the obvious colors are red, orange and brown, but there were wildflowers throughout the route, including purple mulla mulla, and small birds seemed to be everywhere.
Having lived in the Middle East for several years, we thought we had a reasonable idea of what spending two weeks in a desert environment would feel like, but Tjoritja / West MacDonnell National Park was completely different and reminded us how many very different landscapes can sit underneath the same word.
Tell Your Trail, and why this took us five years to write
The Larapinta also came right at the beginning of a very different chapter for us and for Tell Your Trail.
By then we had sold pretty much everything and set off to travel around Australia, with Tell Your Trail becoming the business we worked on while we were on the road. The plan was to spend a few years traveling, build the business as we went and eventually make the move to Italy.
The Larapinta happened during that first period of trying to work out what this new way of living and working would actually look like, and there were plenty of hours on the trail to talk about the business and where we wanted it to go. We had also taken hundreds of photos and plenty of footage with the idea of using it for Tell Your Trail after the hike.
Not long afterwards, our car caught fire and burned down. The drone went with it, along with a large amount of the Larapinta footage, and without a tow vehicle we also had to sell the caravan. We needed to get to Perth to replace our passports, which were also lost in the car fire, and what was supposed to be part of a much longer trip around Australia changed direction when we settled there instead.
We stayed in Perth for the next four years, and it was not until 2025 that we finally picked up the original plan again, packed up our life in Australia and moved to Italy. Tell Your Trail came with us, as did the Larapinta poster we had designed before walking the trail and later framed for ourselves in Perth.
That poster looks completely different to us now. Rocky Bar Gap is no longer simply a name on a map, Hermits Hideaway has a sunrise attached to it, Serpentine Chalet Dam comes with memories of red dust inside the tent, Ellery Creek North is the afternoon we decided to stop early, Hugh Gorge means arriving after 30 kilometers and putting up the tent in the dark, and Wallaby Gap is where we spent our final night.
Looking back now, the Larapinta challenged us far more than we expected, both physically and mentally, but those same fourteen days gave us ridge-top sunrises, afternoons beside the water, enormous views across the ranges, wildflowers in the desert and plenty of time to think about where we wanted our lives to go next. By the time we finally reached our caravan in Alice Springs we were exhausted, ready for a proper shower and genuinely sad that the experience was over, and five years and a move to the other side of the world later, we still talk about the Larapinta as one of those trails we would happily go back and walk all over again.
Our 14-day Larapinta Trail itinerary
For anyone interested in how we divided the route, this is where we slept each night:
- Day 1: Redbank Gorge — Mount Sonder return, camped at Redbank Gorge
- Day 2: Redbank Gorge → Rocky Bar Gap
- Day 3: Rocky Bar Gap → Ormiston Gorge via Finke River
- Day 4: Ormiston Gorge → Hermits Hideaway
- Day 5: Hermits Hideaway → Serpentine Chalet Dam
- Day 6: Serpentine Chalet Dam → Serpentine Gorge
- Day 7: Serpentine Gorge → Ellery Creek North
- Day 8: Ellery Creek North → Hugh Gorge
- Day 9: Hugh Gorge → Section 4/5 Junction
- Day 10: Section 4/5 Junction → Standley Chasm
- Day 11: Standley Chasm → Jay Creek
- Day 12: Jay Creek → Bond Gap
- Day 13: Bond Gap → Wallaby Gap via Simpsons Gap
- Day 14: Wallaby Gap → Alice Springs Telegraph Station → caravan park
