The Ormiston Gorge – West McDonnel Range
Cost: No charge
Duration: 3-4 hours
Difficulty: A cut or two on your hands and feet

A peculiarity of modern video games is that you never truly die. The player is given unlimited chances to succeed, no matter how many times he may plummet down a canyon.

A vaguely related peculiarity of rocks is that they don’t care how soft your flesh and brittle your bones are. This tenuous association was foremost on my mind as I grappled the cubic face of Ormiston Gorge, an ancient geological beauty deep in the scorched red heart of the Australian outback. If I should slip and smash my skull on the rocks 10 meters down, maybe, just maybe, like Lara Croft and her brethren, I would emerge a few meters back in full health and, if lucky, sporting a pair of impossibly taut DD-cup breasts.

But video games aren’t wholly lifelike, and fortunately, I completed this level on the first try. And how I got in that situation I owe to either: a) Australians’ twisted sense of humour, or b) a poorly-marked trail.

We had completed 2.5 hours of a three-hour walk around the Gorge, which is 130 kilometres west of Alice Springs. It’s mostly quite tame. You get used quickly to looking down to assess the sturdiness of the trail and then up to see if any huntsman spiders made their home between branches above you, forcing you into a spine-shilling game of limbo.

And for the most part, it’s well-marked. For the most part. When we arrived at the Gorge, filled with tea-coloured water thanks to the recent wet season, there was no way of crossing without swimming.

Some of us had expensive cameras in our bags. And there was the possibility of scaling the gorge walls, which were eroded into nice rectangular ledges, and hoping one ledge was wide enough to hold a body to the other dry end.

This was the easy part of the gorge crossing.

The little red arrows that had led us so faithfully to this point were nowhere in sight. Climb or swim. I climbed, and, like a good mule, carried the bag of one of the girls I was traveling with, who opted for swim.

I got to one wide ledge but it ended on a rocky wall and the next walkable one was four meters below with no easy way of stepping down. I had to go back and climb to the next highest ledge. This is where it got interesting.

Nature is a contrarian sculptor and eschews most conventions in structure and form. The ledges on the gorge are wildly uneven, and a safe landing may vanish into an uncrossable gap or shrink into slivers of stone, just enough to hold a few toes and fingertips.

Lara Croft, when scaling Spiderman-like the face of a canyon, can leap from toehold to toehold with little more than a grunt that could be mistaken for a porn excerpt. The sounds I made sounded more like “shit shit shit shit.” Earlier in the trail I had stepped on a loose rock and cut my palm on one of its mercilessly jagged peers. And that was impact from 15 centimeters away. Even if I managed to leap perfectly sideways onto the ledge and still brag it, my palm would be shredded into strips of skin.

I can thank video games for giving me a mild case do ADHD, but no dose of Ritalin could focus me like that rock did. There are few times in modern life when you feel wholly focused on the present, and holding on for the integrity of your bones is one of them.

When I finally got to the other side, where the water was shallow enough to cross without swimming, all the thoughts that were on hold, shoved outside the velvet rope of survival, came tumbling in like an unruly mob. Among the crowd was Lara in her mini shorts, about-to-burst tank top, and whip-like pony tail. She was smiling and winking at me.