Gold, given its weight, won’t travel far when carried by water, so while the rest of long gone landscapes eroded, whatever gold reached the surface (and remember, this is all guesswork, Hughesy's geological knowledge doesn't extend much beyond the geomorphology component of Geography I in 1969 and the recent Time Traveller's Guide to Australia) wouldn't have gone far. Not in the first instance, anyway. But over the years the grains would have gradually been carried downwards, a little at a time, collecting behind whatever barrier impeded the flow of water, and creating the pockets of alluvial that gave rise to the label The River of Gold.
We broke the journey at the Palmer River Roadhouse, where the phone call established that, yes, there was a guide available, and that he was booked to do a tour of Split Rock with a party on a tour bus, and when he'd finished with them he'd look after us provided we could give him a lift back into Laura. The cost would be eighty dollars a head, not exactly cheap, but I figured it was better to have some idea what we were looking at and, presumably, he'd get us to places we wouldn't find ourselves.
The rest of the instructions were vaguer than some in the party would have liked. Drive into the car park at Split Rock, I was told. If there's an Outback Spirit bus in the car park, he's up in the gallery with the tour. If you get there after the tour has gone I'll get him to wait at the kiosk.
Lack of clarification about driving conditions didn't please the driver, but I reckoned the bloke on the other end on the line probably knew what he was doing. If his guide was going to get back we needed to get there, so presumably there was nothing to prevent us from doing that.
From the Road House there's a rapid descent of the Byerstown range, Byerstown (long since gone) being the easternmost settlement on the Palmer and then we were in the wide river valley that takes you, first, to Lakeland Downs, and then, after a left hand turn, towards Laura.
There are huge swathes of broad acre farming around Lakeland, and the ranges are a relatively distant prospect on the left and right. Somewhere in there over on the left was the legendary Hells Gate, a narrow gap in the escarpment, three days' walk without water, a place so narrow that buckles on the saddles of passing teams of pack horses left scrape marks on the rock.
The ranges on either side narrowed as we neared Laura, and we started to spot formations just under the ridge line that certainly looked, to a novice's eyes, like the sort of place where you might find shelter during the wet season. Shortly thereafter a signpost pointed us towards the Split Rock car park, just off the bitumen highway. More...