Reposting – Weekend Wanderings – The Pink Lakes

I can’t believe it has been over 10 years since I first went to the Pink Lakes in the Mallee. It is an amazing place, and sadly, it has been a few years since I’ve been there. I found this post that I wrote on my old blog back in July 2014 and thought it would be a great post to repost. I hope you enjoy it.

On my recent trip to the Mallee I was able to go back to the Pink Lakes and explore it some more. The Pink Lakes are part of the Murray Sunset National Park, stuck up in the North West Corner of the state of Victoria here in Australia.  I have been there twice now and I know I will be going back a lot more.  It is amazing how different it can be each time you go. This time I was expecting to see a lot more water because of the rain.

One of the first things that struck me was how much pinker the lakes were than the last time we were there. Though there wasn’t as much water in them as I expected.  We have had so much rain down here that I assumed they would have had more than usual too and thought there might be a lot more water in the lakes.  They’ve certainly had some, but I did think they would be fuller.

It is such a desolate (my new favourite word) country up there and it is not unusual to see trees struggling to survive.  Not much does survive up there.

On the lake in the previous image there was a large part of it that had no water and we saw someone else walking on the salt, so we went for a walk too.  The salt was compacted and we had no trouble walking on it. Though we were told later that you have to be very careful as a wet spot could be there and it would be like quick sand. I couldn’t get over the texture.  It was like tough skin, and there are other photos on the gallery for you to see that.  I liked the above one for the salt crystals, they looked so nice.

Out at the lakes there are still things that have been left from the days when they mined the salt.  There are these large mounds of salt just sitting there. They are very hard now, and the textures on them are quite amazing. I did climb up them to get some photos, and I took some photos from them.  They gave you a nice high advantage, though again, it is probably something you need to be careful with.

I was told this was bush spinach and you could pick it and eat it.  I don’t really like normal spinach, so if it’s okay, I might give it a miss. This was growing everywhere.  I suppose if you got stuck there you wouldn’t starve, die of thirst maybe, but not starve.

We went over to the third lake and it was also dry, or so it seemed, when we went to see if we could walk into it, it was obvious that is was still far too wet and you just started sinking, so we only walked around the edges. This time we saw a lot more of the old piers or ramps that were there. The above was a piece of wood from one that has swelled and buckled.  I loved the shape of it.

I am hoping to go to the Pink Lakes again in Spring, I want to see the wild flowers.  I have a gallery for you now, there are lots of photos. I was going to try and cull them, but I couldn’t decide which ones to leave out, so you are getting them all.  I really enjoyed getting these photos.  The landscape here is so different to many places and I hope you enjoy them.

The original post had a lot more photos and I still wanted to show them, so I made the decision to put the rest into a Silent Sunday post which you can see next Sunday.