I flew from Sydney to Alice Springs, where I rented a four-wheel drive and hit the road deep into the desert. Three hundred miles across a barren red waste loomed Uluru. A 550-million-year-old monolith sacred to the Anangu and other Aboriginal people for some 65,000 years, it was "discovered" by white men in 1873 who renamed it Ayer's Rock after some minister.
A UNESCO World Heritage site, Uluru was only recently banned from climbing, out of cultural respect as much as safety concerns. Much of it is restricted from photography, sketching or other reproduction due to the sacred nature of the rock face and its thousands of weathered holes and natural features, which Aboriginal people memorized and interpreted as part of their oral history and origin mythology.
I arrived as the sun was setting. Racing to reach the rock before the magic started, I flew by fields of tall grasses emblazoned in gold against a majestic blue sky. I pulled off the road, kicking up a cloud of red dust, and set up a tripod to record a time lapse. Just then, Uluru fired up from a rusted red to a glowing orange—an Edison bulb radiating heat and light—and then cooled to a purple brown. All this happened in just a few minutes.
The next morning, I returned with a bottle of water, a can of Pringles, and a mesh mosquito hoodie. I'd planned to pack a picnic lunch but the hotel wasn't allowed to sell takeaway, maybe out of a concern for trash. The hike around Uluru's base is 6.2 miles and takes about three hours—double if you're a shutterbug.
It was around 40°F when I started. There were only a dozen other hikers. As the sun climbed up the sky, the flies descended. They were so dense around my mesh-covered face that I frequently brushed them away just to see or shoot. The only sound was of my feet flip flopping over gravel.