Part V: Chawlty Towers

This is the fifth post in the “It’s Pronounced Fronkensteen!” series.  This series of posts will follow our trials, travails, successes, and lack of successes in the lab.

There exists a land an hour and a half’s drive from Townsville.  A magical land known as Charters Towers.  The local visitor’s center has a small yellow pamphlet listing 102 things you didn’t know about Charters Towers.  As we knew nothing going into Charters Towers, apparently there’s only a total of 102 to know.  There’s no such thing as a 103rd thing to know about Charters Towers.  Here are some of the more exciting entries:

10.  The present Post Office was built in 1892, and the clock tower was added in 1898.

24.  The weir on the Burdekin was built in 1900.

69.  The telegraph was connected to Charters Towers on 29th December, 1874.

80.  The film “The Irishman” was partly filmed in Charters Towers.

96.  In 1875, rump steak was 10 cents a kilo.

We’re going to stop there, as we fear any additional excitement may cause harm to our readers.

What’s a bit odd about this trip today, is that we’ve already been out to Charters Towers, way back on our second weekend in Australia.  That day was cloudy, gloomy, and everything in town shut down at 2pm.  We arrived at 1:55pm.  Needless to say, there was less than a little something going on.  (As you might already be able to surmise based on the 102 facts.)

Today, Tiff’s scientist, Carl (of Pulp Diction fame), took us out on a field trip to three sites along the Burdekin River.  Charters Towers is about an hour and a half away from Townsville, so we had an early departure of about 7am.  We had no trouble getting up for that, as we knew we’d be able to nap in the car.

After an uneventful drive, we arrived at a bridge over the river.  While the river does not look like much at this point (as you can see by the photo below), this river can become a monster in the wet season.

The river regularly floods in the wet season.  The river always rises.  Sometimes is rises in spectacular fashion.  The most recent of these events was back in 2009.  During that rainy season, the river rose all the way up to the road surface, and then another fifteen meters above that.  Now that is a serious flood!  If you recall the rainstorm we had on the last dinner of conference week (almost four inches of rain in one night), picture rain like that lasting for days over a huge swath of the country.  That’s how you get a flood like that.  It’s almost mind boggling.  Almost.

Down along the banks of the now docile river are some great rock formations.  And at the risk of losing half of the people reading this, we’re not going to get into great detail about it.  Let’s just say that there were typically intrusive and extrusive rocks touching each other – and that’s not supposed to happen.  Mind numbing!

So we walked around there for a while.  When we got back to the pick-up truck, the actual geologists wanted to take some enormous samples back, so they loaded up the back with a bunch of enormous rocks.  Little did we know how these would come in handy later in the day…….

Our next stop was a but further up the road, and a bit further upstream.  We pulled off the road and found that the dirt road had two locked gates.  One gate had six locks on it.  The other led up to a house.  Rob got out and went to ring the doorbell.  We wondered if he would ever return…..

When he got back he said that we could access the river through the homeowner’s property.  The homeowner was very curious on why we wanted to get down to the river.  I’m sure she was then confused when she was told we wanted to look at rocks down there.  If we were really up to no good we would have had a better cover story.

To get down to the river we had to traipse (and how often does one get to use the word ‘traipse’?) through the bush to get down to the river.  Here, there were outcrops in the middle of the river, which were nowhere near water this time of year, but they had some cool stuff going on.  Stuff like rocks intruding the cracks of other rocks.   Did I just hear you say “Ooooooooooh…..”?

Probably not.

It was quite a pretty vista in the little river bend.

So we walked around there for a while.  Cassian found a rugby ball floating down the river.  And we looked at rocks.  While all of this may sound like the most boring thing in the world, we promise that it was not.  We like rocks.  It was pretty.  It was a gorgeous day.  And the rock formations, as we were told, were some of the best examples that you’ll ever find.  They were pretty funky looking.  At the risk of rock overload, here’s one of the cooler features:

We departed this site, and walked back to the car along a different route.  We had to climb over two fences — only one of which was electrified.  About seven or eight minutes into the walk, we stopped to look around to figure out where to go next.  We knew we parked along the river.  It was just a matter of finding that exact spot again.  But we did!

We departed the second site and went into the town of Charters Towers.  Luckily for us, it was before 2pm, so we got to see the town in action!  Oh, that action!

We stopped for a spot of tea and coffee in a cafe before we continued about fifteen minutes further north on the road.  This would be our last stop, but it would be a big stop, with a few places to visit along the way.  It’s at a location called Big Bend, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.  There’s a big bend in the Burdekin River.  And it just so happens that there’s some impressive geologic formations in this neck of the bush.

Our first pit stop had some limestone with fossils in it directly next to a massive lava flow.  (The flow has cooled by now, obviously.)  We spent a good deal of time looking for interesting fossils.  There was quite a bit of coral, which incidentally makes for a quite a boring-looking fossil.  We did find a well eroded giant snail fossil.  That was pretty fun.

So we walked around there for a while.  After we collected a few samples, the most exciting of which being some ropey basalt, we headed further downstream to an outcrop where there were more rocks, this time all igneous.  There was a massive intrusion cliff across the water and it was quite impressive.  One of the things that the geologists have said at every site we’ve been to today is that it would make a good campsite.  And to their credit, they’ve been right every time – if you like camping.  The lack of facilities would be a bit of deterrent for some, though.

So we walked around there for a while.  Then we loaded into the truck to get to the most dramatic point of the river.  And when we got there, we realized that the view was much better from the place where we just were.  We decided to move on.  We had to do a number of three-point turns to turn around from the dead end we had driven to.

But Carl had a better idea in mind!  He had previously arranged for a great team-building activity.  He knew we would be trying to turn around the pick-up truck in soft sand, so he got it stuck in the sand on purpose to give us the challenge of getting it unstuck.  What an idea!

And it only took us the better part of an hour to get it out.  We used our ingenuity to find huge strips of bark from nearby trees to put under the wheels, along with the gabbro samples we collected earlier.  (See?  Carl was planning it all along!)  We then used the jack to raise the wheels of the car so we could get the bark and rock underneath.  And on the third attempt, the pick-up broke free from its sandy grave and drove onward and upward.  Well, not exactly upward.  We had difficulty getting back up the hill.

Link to YouTube Clip of Truck Trying to Climb the Hill

We never made it up that hill.  After five or six attempts we decided to go around the hill.  That worked.  We went out to our last site along the river.  The Sun was setting.  It really was quite gorgeous.  The water was flowing over rapids a bit.  There were large outcrops in the middle of the water.  And yes, we walked around there for a while.  It was also at this site where we came up with an idea.  Every year, after their time in Australia, the participants make a presentation back to the current crop of researchers back in New York City.  At the end, some kind of gift is shared or distributed.  We have been thinking about it for quite a while.  And as we tossed around ideas as we watched the Sun begin to slip behind the line that meets the sky, we came upon an idea.  The execution will take place over the next few weeks, but we’re pretty jazzed about it.  We’d tell you what we came up with, but that would ruin all the fun, wouldn’t it?

Eventually it was getting high time to saddle back into the pick-up and mosey on away from the Burdekin.  Perhaps ‘mosey’ isn’t the word.  We floored it over every hill and dale to make sure we didn’t get stuck again on our way out to the paved main road.  What a relief it was to get to the main road and not have to complete another team-building exercise!  Phew!

On the drive back, the sky turned pitch dark, and when you’re this far away from anything, the night sky is absolutely spectacular.  It was one of the best views of the Milky Way we’d ever seen.  It just doesn’t get much better than that.

Field trips don’t get much better than that, either.  It was a pretty awesome, if exhausting day.  And we can’t think of a better way to end it, than with a few more of the amazing facts about Charters Towers.  We leave you with these.  Be sure to enjoy in moderation.

31.  The Dalrymple Shire was named after George Elphinstone Dalrymple.

48.  Mosman Street used to be the busiest street in the early days of Charters Towers.

71.  The Mexican Corner Store and residential area is on the site of the East Mexican Gold Mine.

86.  The cattle population of the Shire is approximately 644,500.