Andrew Harper of Australian Desert Expeditions talks about the joys of exploring the mighty Simpson Desert and how this year's rains have made the desert vibrant with wildflowers and insects.
2025 marks my 30th year of walking in the Simpson Desert, an evolving journey that’s taken me across roughly 25,000 kilometres of this extraordinary landscape. Every step has been cross-country, with my camels carrying the gear. It’s been a true privilege to explore such a vast wilderness and to share with others what makes this place so special.
The Simpson Desert, known as Munga-Thirri to the Wangkangurru/Yarluyandi people on the eastern side, is the world’s largest parallel sand ridge desert, and technically the driest region in Australia.
But this remarkable ecosystem is bordered by one of the world’s great unregulated wild river systems, the Lake Eyre Basin. Minor to major flooding is a natural and welcome part of life in this region, and typically, we see heavy rainfall in the catchment areas some 700 kilometres north of Birdsville, while the desert itself receives little rain or just scattered storms.
It’s rare to experience both significant flooding and widespread rainfall in the desert at the same time. But every few decades, all three major river catchments - Georgina/Eyre Creek, Diamantina, and Cooper Creek - flood simultaneously. The last major rain event was in 2010/11, but even then, flooding was only minor. And the last ‘big flood’ was in 1974.
But this year it’s all happened at once. The massive rainfall event in late March broke rainfall records across Western and Central Queensland, causing widespread & destructive flooding. In addition, one of the newly installed weather stations in the remote Simpson Desert, recorded an extraordinary 346mm of rain in three days.
Munga-Thirri is a classic boom/bust landscape, where extended dry periods are the norm. But when the rains come, the transformation is rapid and life bursts back into the desert almost instantly. Wildflowers are the first to bloom, accompanied by a flurry of insect and bird activity, including migratory species that follow the floodwaters all the way to Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre. And when conditions align perfectly, there can be an extraordinary resurgence in mammal populations, sometimes reaching plague proportions.
2025 will be remembered as a benchmark for floods & rain in the Simpson Desert. As the country’s only operator offering walking treks & ecological surveys through this vast region, which includes Australia’s largest continental national park, we’re preparing for an exceptional season of trekking in truly glorious conditions. This is a rare and special chance to walk through an ancient landscape at its most vibrant and alive. Slow Travel awaits!
Words and photos_Andrew Harper OAM FRGS