People expect the salt at Lake Eyre to be the dramatic bit of the trip. Then they see the Painted Desert at golden hour and quietly rethink things. It’s a run of low, flat-topped hills and breakaways between Coober Pedy and William Creek, on Arckaringa Station country, and the colours are properly strange: rusty reds, creamy whites, soft purples and yellows layered into the rock.

Those bands are old sediment, laid down when this area was under an inland sea, then cooked and weathered by time. The iron in the rock gives you the reds and oranges, and the paler layers are clay and sandstone. The light does the rest. Go at midday and it looks a bit washed out. Go in the last hour before sunset and the whole hillside seems to glow.

Tips from the road

• Late afternoon is the time to be there, both for colour and for the heat
• Take plenty of water, there’s no shade and no shop
• The hills sit on a pastoral station, so follow signs and don’t wander off marked tracks
• A wide lens helps, but your eyes will do a better job than any camera

If you’re only going to add one detour to a Lake Eyre trip, this is the one I’d pick. It costs you a little time and gives you a landscape that looks nothing like the salt flats, which makes the whole journey feel bigger.

Every so often a guest asks me, a bit sheepishly, whether the giant man in the desert is real. It is. In June 1998 a charter pilot flying over the country west of Marree spotted an enormous outline of a figure etched into the ground, holding what looks like a throwing stick. Nobody in the district had seen anyone build it. It was just there.

The figure is huge, roughly four kilometres from head to foot, which is why you really only appreciate it from the air. Standing next to the lines on the ground, you’d struggle to make sense of the shape at all. It sits on country that’s part of the Finniss Springs area, and for years the mystery of who made it, and how they marked out something that size without anyone noticing, kept the story alive.

What’s actually known

• It appeared sometime around 1998 and was reported to the public later that year
• The maker was a mystery for a long time, and the question of who was responsible has been argued over since
• Wind and rain have been wearing the lines away, so it’s faded over the years
• It sits on private and Aboriginal-held land, so access is controlled, check before you go

I’ll be straight with you: the Marree Man isn’t a headline stop on most Lake Eyre itineraries, and the best view is from a scenic flight. But it’s a cracking story to tell on the drive up through Marree, and it’s one of those things that reminds you how big and strange this part of the country is.

Almost every guest who’s done an overnight Lake Eyre tour mentions the stars, unprompted, at some point in the trip. It’s not something I have to sell hard, because the moment the sun goes down and there’s genuinely no artificial light for a hundred kilometres in any direction, people notice immediately.

South Australia’s outback, including the country around Lake Eyre, sits well away from any significant population centres, and the air out here is usually dry and free of the haze you get in more humid or built-up regions. On a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way isn’t a faint smudge — it’s a genuine band of light across the sky, and you can often make out its structure with the naked eye.

What makes conditions here so good for stargazing

• Minimal light pollution from towns or infrastructure
• Consistently low humidity and clear air, especially outside the wet season
• Flat, open horizons with nothing blocking the sky line
• High elevation isn’t needed here — the darkness does the work

If you’re travelling with even a basic camera and a tripod, it’s worth setting aside twenty minutes after dinner to try some long-exposure shots. You don’t need serious astrophotography gear to come away with a genuinely striking photo of the sky out here — the conditions are doing most of the work for you.

Cooper Creek isn’t technically part of Lake Eyre itself, but it’s one of the major rivers that feeds into the Lake Eyre Basin, and its history is impossible to separate from the story of exploration in this part of Australia. Most Australians know the names Burke and Wills from school, but fewer know just how closely their tragic 1860-61 expedition is tied to this exact waterway.

The expedition’s depot camp at Cooper Creek, known to history as the ‘Dig Tree’ site, is where the ill-fated final chapter of their journey played out — a story of missed timing, a buried cache of supplies, and a rescue party that arrived just hours after the depot party had given up and moved on. It’s a genuinely sobering piece of Australian history, and one that plays out against the same kind of harsh, unforgiving country our Lake Eyre tours pass through.

Why it’s worth knowing before you go

• It gives real historical weight to the landscape you’re driving through, not just scenery
• Cooper Creek’s flows are part of what occasionally feeds Lake Eyre itself during flood events
• The expedition’s failures are a genuine lesson in respecting this environment, which still applies to modern travellers
• Some tour routes pass near sites connected to the expedition, depending on itinerary

I bring this history up on tours not to be morbid, but because I think it changes how people look at the landscape. This isn’t just empty country — it’s country with a long, complicated human history layered into it, some of it hard-won knowledge that the traditional owners always had.

This is one of those facts I love dropping on a tour because it genuinely catches people off guard: there is a Lake Eyre Yacht Club. Founded decades ago by a group who saw the vast, flat, wind-exposed salt surface of the dry lake bed and thought — quite reasonably, in an eccentric Australian way — that it would make an excellent place to sail.

Land yachts, essentially sailing rigs mounted on wheels or skis instead of a hull, could reach genuinely high speeds skimming across the hard, flat salt crust when conditions were dry. For a stretch of time, the club held informal meets out on the lake, and it became a minor but well-documented curiosity in Australian outback lore.

Where things stand today

• Traditional owners have asked that recreational sailing on the lake bed be respected as culturally sensitive ground
• Access to parts of the lake is managed more carefully now than it was decades ago
• The history itself remains a great story and a reminder of how creatively people have engaged with this landscape
• Our tours focus on viewing and photographing the lake respectfully, not recreating the old land-sailing runs

I still think it’s worth knowing the history, even if the practice has moved on — it says something about how this landscape has always attracted people looking to do something a bit unusual with a very unusual place.

William Creek is one of those places that sounds made up until you’re standing in it. The permanent population sits somewhere around a handful of people, and it’s often cited as the smallest incorporated town in Australia. There’s a pub, an airstrip, a campground, and not a whole lot else — and honestly, that’s exactly the appeal.

Sitting almost dead centre on the Oodnadatta Track and right at the edge of Anna Creek Station, William Creek has become the natural staging point for anyone heading out to Lake Eyre. The pub itself has been operating for well over a century in various forms, and its walls and ceiling are covered in stickers, banknotes, and memorabilia left behind by decades of travellers passing through.

Why William Creek is part of nearly every Lake Eyre itinerary

• It’s the closest fuel, food and accommodation point to the lake itself
• Scenic flights over Lake Eyre depart from the William Creek airstrip
• The pub is a genuine slice of outback culture, not a tourist reconstruction of one
• It sits within Anna Creek Station, giving a real sense of the scale of outback pastoral land

Most of our multi-day tours build in a night here, and it’s usually one of the trip highlights guests mention afterwards — not because there’s a long list of things to do, but because there’s so little competing for your attention that you actually notice the stars, the quiet, and the sheer scale of the place.

I’ve had a handful of guests over the years who booked a Lake Eyre tour specifically chasing one thing: the pelicans. It sounds like an odd drawcard for a desert tour, until you understand what actually happens when the lake fills with water after a significant flood event.

When enough water reaches Lake Eyre, usually from monsoonal rain far north in Queensland’s channel country working its way down through the river systems over weeks or months, the lake can transform from a dry salt pan into a genuine inland sea. Fish and other aquatic life move in, and Australian pelicans follow, arriving from breeding colonies right across the continent to take advantage of the sudden food supply. In a big flood year, breeding colonies numbering in the tens of thousands have been recorded on the lake’s islands.

What makes this event so rare

• Lake Eyre only floods significantly a handful of times each century
• Pelicans time their migration to arrive once conditions are right, not on a fixed schedule
• The breeding islands are difficult to access, which protects the colonies but also limits close viewing
• Scientists still don’t fully understand how pelicans detect a flood event from so far away

If you’re planning a trip hoping to catch a flood or breeding event, my honest advice is to stay flexible with dates and keep an eye on water reports for the northern catchments — it’s not something you can guarantee, but when it happens, it’s one of the most extraordinary sights in Australian nature.

Most people booking a Lake Eyre tour are focused entirely on the lake itself, which is fair enough — it’s the headline act. But some of my favourite moments on these trips happen well before we get anywhere near the salt. The mound springs at Wabma Kadarbu Conservation Park, north of William Creek, are one of those stops that quietly steals the show.

These springs are fed by the Great Artesian Basin, and the water reaching the surface has often been underground for tens of thousands of years, slowly making its way through the aquifer before finally emerging as a spring in the middle of what looks like featureless desert. Over time, mineral deposits and sediment build up around the outlet and form raised mounds, some several metres high, with a small pool of water sitting on top or nearby.

Why the mound springs matter

• They’re a rare permanent water source in an otherwise arid landscape
• Aboriginal people have used these springs as reliable water points for thousands of years
• They support unique plant and small animal life found almost nowhere else in the region
• Early European explorers and pastoralists relied on the same springs to move stock and supplies

We usually build a short stop here into the itinerary on the drive up. It’s a good leg-stretch, a genuinely interesting bit of geology and history, and it sets up the contrast nicely — from ancient bubbling water to the driest, flattest expanse of salt on the continent, all in the same day.

Among the small number of Earth features that astronauts and satellite imagery can pick out clearly from orbit, Lake Eyre holds a spot — its scale and its stark contrast against the surrounding desert make it one of the more recognisable Australian landmarks visible from well beyond the atmosphere.

Why It Stands Out So Clearly

From orbit, Lake Eyre’s brilliant white salt surface creates an extraordinary contrast against the deep red-brown of the surrounding desert country. This isn’t unique to satellite imagery — it’s exactly the same effect that makes the lake so visually striking from a light aircraft during the scenic flight, just observed from a vastly greater altitude.

The lake’s genuinely enormous surface area — around 9,500 square kilometres at its fullest extent — means it registers clearly even in imagery covering huge swathes of the continent, unlike many smaller landmarks that require much higher resolution imagery to identify.

What Satellite Imagery Reveals

Satellite monitoring of Lake Eyre has become a genuinely useful scientific tool for tracking flooding events. Because the lake is so remote and difficult to monitor comprehensively from the ground, satellite imagery lets researchers track water extent, movement, and evaporation rates across the entire lake system in a way that would be impractical using ground-based observation alone.

This kind of monitoring has substantially improved scientific understanding of how flood events develop and recede over time, and it’s part of how organisations track the water flowing down the Diamantina, Cooper Creek, and Georgina systems long before it reaches the lake itself.

Astronaut Observations

Various astronauts have specifically noted Lake Eyre among the Australian landmarks recognisable from the International Space Station, alongside other major features like the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru. It’s a distinctive enough shape and colour contrast that it doesn’t require specialist knowledge to identify from orbit — it simply looks unlike anything else in the vicinity.

A Different Way to Think About Scale

There’s something worth sitting with in the fact that a place you can stand on the edge of, hear the silence of, and photograph up close is also large enough to be clearly identifiable from several hundred kilometres up in orbit. It’s one more way of grappling with the genuine scale of the lake — an experience that’s difficult to process at ground level, and somehow equally difficult to process from the opposite extreme of altitude.

Seeing It From the Air, If Not From Space

While we can’t offer the orbital view, the scenic flight included in our Lake Eyre tours gives you the closest thing most people will ever get to appreciating the lake’s genuine scale from above. Get in touch to find out more about upcoming tour dates.

People are curious about this more than you might expect — once the excitement of booking a scenic flight settles in, questions about the actual mechanics come up. Who’s flying the plane? What kind of aircraft is it? How experienced are these pilots in conditions this remote? Fair questions, and worth answering properly.

The Aircraft

Scenic flights over Lake Eyre typically use small, light aircraft carrying between four and six passengers plus the pilot. These aircraft are chosen specifically for their ability to operate from short, unsealed outback airstrips — the kind found at William Creek — and for the visibility they offer passengers, generally with high-set wings that don’t obstruct the view down toward the lake.

These are not commercial airline-style aircraft. They’re smaller, lighter, and give a noticeably different flying experience — closer to the ground in terms of feel, more responsive to air movement, and offering a much more direct visual connection to the landscape below.

Who the Pilots Are

The pilots operating these flights are commercially licensed and hold specific endorsements for the aircraft they fly, along with extensive experience in outback and remote-area flying specifically. Flying over genuinely remote terrain, sometimes with limited navigation reference points given the flat, uniform landscape below, requires a different skill set from flying over more conventional, feature-rich terrain.

Many of the pilots working these routes have spent years flying in outback conditions specifically, which matters more than general flying hours alone — reading weather patterns specific to this region, understanding the particular challenges of a featureless salt lake for visual navigation, and managing the practical realities of operating from remote airstrips with minimal infrastructure.

Safety Standards

Australian aviation safety standards apply fully to these operations, regardless of how remote the departure point feels. Aircraft undergo the same maintenance and inspection regimes required of any commercial aviation operation, and pilots are subject to the same licensing, currency, and health requirements as any other commercial pilot in Australia.

Weather Decision-Making

Pilots operating these flights make conservative decisions about weather conditions, and it’s genuinely their call, not the tour operator’s, whether a flight proceeds on a given day. If conditions aren’t suitable — wind, visibility, dust — the flight is delayed or rescheduled rather than proceeding with unnecessary risk. This is part of why we’ve built some flexibility into our itineraries, as we’ve discussed elsewhere regarding weather delays.

What This Means for You

The scenic flight is in genuinely capable, experienced hands. The pilots flying these routes have chosen to specialise in exactly this kind of flying, and their judgment about when and how to fly safely over Lake Eyre is something we trust completely as part of how we run our tours.