Woke to a very cold morning. 0 degrees at 8am with ice on the bonnet of the car. We decided that we would have breakfast at Rainbow Valley, about a 30 minute drive away. Before breakfast, we did a short walk to a lookout point where we got great views of the surrounding multicoloured mountains. There are quite a few walks in this area, but we only felt like doing the lookout walk this morning.

Before we left Rainbow Valley, we emptied our 4 jerry cans of fuel into the tank, which just about filled us up again. After checking the maps, we headed of for Chambers Pillar.

Roads were interesting. The road we wanted to take was a no through road so we decided to follow the other road which initially headed away from where we wanted to go, but eventually looped back and joined up. It's times like these that our Oziexplorer mapping software comes in very handy. We were heading in the right direction, but after about 45 minutes of corrugations, rocks and soft sand driving (felt a bit like we were back on the CSR again), we came to a private property locked gate. Bugger!! 

Back the way we had already come, all the way past Rainbow Valley and back out to the Stuart highway again. We made the decision that we would give Chambers Pillar a miss, but found a good off road track to Owen Springs, which we decided to take. It was only about 50km long, but crossed the Hugh River (mostly dry) at least a dozen times, as well as driving down the riverbed in sections. We also visited the ruins of the Owen Springs Homestead, originally built sometime in the 1880s. The ruins have now been partially restored.

We decided that we would head for Palm Valley tonight, but were both pretty tired after a day of rough driving, so stopped for the night at the Hermannsberg campground (another one behind a locked gate, with barbed wire fences).