Opalton, a brief stopover unrelated to dinosaurs but in dinosaur country

I’ve mentioned before that Nick and I use an app called WikiCamps to find campsites. Sometimes, the app also leads to cool detours – like our little stopover in a place called Opalton.

I learned about Opalton while scoping out campsites near Winton, where we were planning to spend a few days checking out the dinosaur fossils and the world’s only fossilised dinosaur stampede. It was about 100km away from both Winton and Lark Quarry, the site of the fossilised stampede, had a five star user rating on WikiCamps, advertised hot showers, and a price of $2.50 per person per night – sounded awesome to us!

Upon arrival, our expectations were met and exceeded by a lovely friendly little bush campground with lots of space, a donkey shower (more later on this), friendly managers, locals, and fellow campers, and a cool camp kitchen constructed from – we learned later – extra ‘stuff’ from the nearby mines.

And of course, not unique to this campground, but man… you just can’t beat those Outback sunsets…

Opalton, if you haven’t already guessed from the name, originated as a precious opal mining town, after opal was first discovered in the area in 1888. By 1899 the largest piece of pipe opal ever discovered had been unearthed here, and there was a township of approximately 600 people. However by the end of WWI the water supply had dried up and so had the town – but not the opal.

There are still many opal mines in the area, some extremely productive, and it’s a bit of a fun side activity for campers at this campground to go looking for opal of their own in the rock remnants around the campground. We decided to have a go, and with the guidance of a few of the campers who had been around the block before (and their kids – man, kids are great at finding opal), managed to find a few pieces of sparkly, colourful stuff.

Nothing valuable mind you, but a few pretty pieces with some bright colour. The miners in this area use heavy machinery now, and are mainly concerned with what’s called ‘boulder opal’ – it’s extremely valuable because the opal can be cut out of it as one gemstone/piece, whereas typically opal must be set on a piece of rock to create a gemstone look.

I also mentioned the donkey shower – our North American friends may be wondering what on earth is a donkey shower?? Well, it’s simply a shower where the hot water is provided via a wood fire.

I’m pleased to report that both Nick and I had great success with the donkey shower method!

We liked Opalton so much that we stayed two nights rather than one, and had a bit of time to relax, meet our camping neighbours, and even got a couple of projects done (we have a running list of small ‘home improvement’ projects to get done on the road, but rarely enough time to work on them!).

But, two nights was all we could spare, as we had a lot of ground to cover in Australia’s very own Dinosaur Country…

MVP: The friendly local miners at Opalton, who all gathered at the campground one night to hold a barbecue to benefit the Royal Flying Doctors! We asked the manager of the campground whether this was a monthly occurrence and he said more like weekly – or even more frequently. Super cool.

So, Where Exactly Is This?

NEW FEATURE (don’t say we don’t love you)…Here’s a screenshot! The red is what we’ve covered in previous posts, the part we talk about in this post is in green. I’ll update previous posts with these screenshots as well as all future posts, so it’s easier to follow along.

But, we’re definitely not there anymore! Interested in following our route live? We have a satellite device that pings our shared Garmin map frequently! You can find it here.