After passing through our last gate of the morning, we drove up the dry, rocky ridge and found ourselves in a field of...

Purple.

The gas well they'd drilled here had, fortunately, come up dry. Evidenced by the isolated, plugged pipe standing two meters tall in the middle of the drill pad. And apparently, the only seed to take root in the company's reseeding mixture was beeplant.

From a distance, the road, now in the early stages of reclamation, was a purple ribbon through a grey and brown world tinged with green.

"Beeplant" is aptly named, as each large plant had one or two bees, busily foraging from flowerhead to flowerhead.

But our path home did not take us down this purple ribbon, where it would be best no one drives anyway. South we went, on the rugged two-track.

Past the crews drilling test core wells for the latest energy boom to hit this place...

Uranium.