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Dead Trees - Lake Richardson and Red Lake

Lake Richardson is on Arcoona Station in outback South Australia. Usually a dry, salt lake, the good rains in this part of the outback over the past year or so have left Lake Richardson with a fair bit of water, enough to have drawn several varieties of water birds including black swans.

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Around the perimiter of Lake Richardson and the adjoining Red Lake are rows of trees of some sort of teatree variety. Not all the way around, mind you. They're pretty patchy on the western side with it's steep, rocky banks, but on the eastern side where there are sand dunes and flats, in some parts multiple rows of trees stretch for half a kilometre in a grove.

The rows of trees appear to have germanated at the high water level that may have been maintained for an erxtended period at some time in the distant past. Or maybe the seed washed up at the high water level in some major rain events and germinated when condidions were right.

Either way, in some places there are three rows of living trees, maybe ten metres apart and a metre or two differnce in elevation. Then there's another row or two of dead trees, much older perhaps, still higher up the sand dunes.

It's these dead trees, some standing, some fallen and others rotted and broken into small bits that captured my imagination on several of my rides around Lake Richardson and Red Lake.

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