Every year, thousands of travellers make the pilgrimage to the remote Wolfe Creek Crater in far north Western Australia.

But accessing the world's second largest meteorite crater — featured in the 2005 horror film Wolf Creek — means negotiating the unsealed Tanami Road, which can prove fatal.

Twenty-two-year-old Bradley Challis had finished his four-year civil engineering Masters degree in the United Kingdom and planned to take a year off to travel.

He had been through South East Asia before arriving in Darwin in November 2017, where he rented a Wicked campervan to drive to Perth.

Bradley Challis was 22 years old when he died in a crash on the remote Tanami Road. ( Supplied: Sally Challis )

He and two friends made their way to Halls Creek in WA, more than 1,100 kilometres from Darwin, before camping the night at the crater.

The next morning, they started the trek back along Tanami Road.

Police think the vehicle rolled once or twice at about 7:30am on November 15.

When police arrived on scene, Bradley was found dead under the van.

Family visits the site

Bradley's family travelled to the accident site last week to lay a memorial.

His mother, Sally Challis, said it was hard to understand the dangers of the road without being behind the wheel.

"The policeman had shown us photographs of the scene of the accident," Ms Challis said.

"But when you actually come down there and drive that piece of road yourself, you think 'this is really dangerous'.

"It's just not safe, and certainly not for 22-year-old driving down in a campervan.

"Bradley was a good driver, he'd been driving since he was seventeen — he'd driven off road and things like that in England before.

"I think this is a different sort of thing — it's a really, really long road that just keeps going and going."



A notorious road, even for locals

The 1050km Tanami Road runs from Halls Creek to Alice Springs, and the Shire of Halls Creek maintains about 300kms of the road up until the state border.

Council has been pushing for years to have the road sealed, which would benefit tourists, truck drivers and the remote communities along the way.

Halls Creek police officer-in-charge Dean Bailey said travelling in anything less than a four-wheel drive is risky.

Bradley Challis' mother Sally flew to Western Australia to set up the memorial in early February. ( Supplied: Sally Challis )

"As a road it's corrugated, so it's quite rough," Senior Sergeant Bailey said.

"Depending on the season it can get flooded quite quickly — in a matter of hours you can be cut off.



"Or you'll have wild animals and stuff that [make] you need to swerve, and when you start swerving to miss stuff on gravel, that's when people start losing control."

He said people often underestimate outback roads, particularly the routes that are unsealed.

"People get comfortable on it, their speed creeps up, and all of a sudden they get in trouble at a high speed or a higher speed than they should be doing."

More recently, the Tanami claimed another life — that of a man in his 40s who was travelling near the NT border on January 25.

Balgo police officer-in-charge Senior Sergeant Don Cooper said major crash detectives were still investigating but it looked like very bad luck — a blown left rear tyre apparently caused the vehicle to roll.

Call for limit to suitable vehicles

Ms Challis hopes raising awareness about the road will prevent more accidents.

Although there is a sign at the start of the road advising careful driving, there is nothing stating that campervans or two-wheel drives are not suitable for the journey.

"If there had been a sign at the end of the road saying it is illegal for two-wheel drives to be on here, and he wasn't allowed to do that, he wouldn't have gone down that road," Ms Challis said.

"One, they shouldn't be allowed to be on that road and two, I think Wicked Campervans need a much higher [age] limit — even 21 is too young.

"You can't hire a vehicle in England unless you're 25.