The Canning Stock Route
One thousand eight hundred and fifty kilometres, from Billiluna in the north to Wiluna in the south. Fifty-one wells, sunk between 1908 and 1910 so that cattle could be walked out of the Kimberley. It crosses the Great Sandy, the Little Sandy and the Gibson deserts, and it is generally agreed to be the most remote vehicle track on earth.
It was chosen for two reasons and neither of them was scenery. It is impossible to get lost on, because it is a line of wells and you walk from one to the next. And it is impossible to be rescued from quickly, which meant everything had to be carried or buried in advance.
There are something like nine hundred parallel sand ridges between the two ends of it. The track crosses every single one at right angles, because the wells run north to south and the ridges run east to west. There is no way round. That was fixed long before anybody thought of driving a bullock down it.
Ninety holes in the ground
The route was provisioned in April 2026, six days of driving from the southern end to the northern with a petrol auger, four hundred and fifty litres of water and ninety paper bags of food packed by hand on a floor in a suburb of Perth.
Every twenty kilometres: stop, bore a hole, bury a day's food and five litres of water, tie a yellow ribbon to the nearest bush, push a wooden skewer into the sand, write it down. Ten or twelve times a day, some days closer to fifteen, for six days.
On each skewer, in her handwriting, ninety times:
THIS IS BARBARA’S FOOD. SHE’S A WALKER 2026. PLEASE LEAVE THERE
— and a smiley face.
Not one of the ninety was ever dug up, robbed or ruined. Not by an animal, and not by a person.
The Gibb River Road
Six hundred and sixty kilometres across the Kimberley, Derby to Kununurra, walked in four weeks in 2025 at thirty kilometres a day with a three-wheeled pram. Two days off. Not one puncture.
It is the walk that worked, and it exists because of a conversation of about six seconds in a caravan park at Wiluna, on the worst day of the whole expedition, with a tour operator who happened to know the road.
Somewhere in that month a Facebook group of several thousand strangers started asking each other whether anybody had seen Barbara today.
The Larapinta Trail
Two hundred and thirty-three kilometres out of Alice Springs. Shorter than the Canning, and desertish, which is the point. Walked and finished in 2026.
How it is done
The alarm goes at half past three. Forty minutes from waking to walking, and the whole sequence — tent, mat, bags, everything into its own place on the trolley in the same order — can be done without light.
Then you walk in the dark, which is the best part of the day. There is nothing to look at, so there is nothing to want, and the temperature is honest.
Five litres of water a day. Three big bottles and one small one, because a small bottle is one you are allowed to finish. Four more litres on the trolley that are never touched under any circumstances. Twenty kilometres, and then a yellow ribbon on a bush.
No music and no podcasts — the navigation app runs all day and owns the battery, so everything else on the telephone stays shut down. An automatic watch, because it eats no power. Everything findable by touch in the dark, so no headlamp burns.
There is no secret and no technique, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling a course.