Gary Junction Road NT-WA TRAVEL
When looking at a map of Australia with a plan for travelling to the west from the east on gazetted roads, there are two familiar treks and two that skirt the more popular waypoints. Of the four, the Nullarbor and the Victoria Highway form part of the loop most folk follow on their big lap. The Great Central Road is a more adventurous drive through Warburton, linking Alice Springs to Uluru and Laverton in WA. The final option covers a nearly direct drive west from the Alice along the Gary Junction Road to the Indian Ocean, somewhere around Port Headland in WA.
For our recent adventure with a group of fellow Trakmaster owners, we liked the look of the remote Gary Junction trek as it had the added bonus of following one of Len Beadell's iconic ‘highways’ for part of the crossing.
Len Beadell is a star in our firmament of outback legends, and he stamped his authority as a largely self-taught geographer and surveyor in the 1960s with his spare crew of the Gunbarrel Road Construction Party. Saddled with the daunting commission of building roads to service the Woomera Rocket Range, which would be sending rockets from South Australia to the Indian Ocean near WA's Eighty Mile Beach, Beadell led his team to
