Local knowledge re Southern Blue Mountains region

[oldlock]

Hi Guys & Girls

I've just moved over from WA where I was fortunate enough to live 10 mins from John Forrest NP. My Sunday morning trip was the Eagle View Trail.

I'm now living in Mount Annan.

I'm looking for local advice / knowledge re suggestions for bushwalks near me. I've done lots of google searches but have a slight problem in that I have no local knowledge and accordingly suburb names etc mean nothing to me as yet.

So - Ideally a walk will be a loop (nice but not essential)
Medium to hard is fine - around 15km ideal.
Really within a 1 hour drive of Mount Annan / Narellean area.

Suggestions appreciated.

TIA

[wildwanderer]

You’re in a good central location to access the majority of days walks in the Greater Sydney area. Most will be aprox 40+ min drive however. There are likely some closer walks especially around the georges river but not as well published, so hopefully someone with campelltown area local knowledge will be able to offer suguestions.

There are two websites I would start with:

http://www.wildwalks.com/
https://www.beyondtracks.com/map

The wild walks website lists a large number of day walks surrounding Sydney and includes detailed track notes. The owner of wildwalks also runs bushwalk.com

The beyond tracks website makes it a little easier to find walks by using its map (In my opinon) especially if your not familar with suburbs or national park locations as yet. However, it doesn’t feature the detailed track notes that the wildwalks site does. As there is no detailed notes beyondtracks features slightly more walks. (beyondtracks does include downloadable gpx tracks for your gps but I have no idea who made them so they may be good or not so good).

Each site has hundreds of walks to choose from. And once you get the lay of the land, you may well start looking beyond the scope of those sites and plan more epic adventures in areas like the Kanangra Boyd or Morton national parks.

Happy walking and welcome to NSW.

[LachlanB]

Welcome to Macarthur, there's a few of us on here who live in the area!

As Wildwanderer said, you'll probably be doing a lot of driving for walks. Public transport is ok, but usually takes more than an hour to get anywhere useful.

There's a series of booklets by Robert Sloss, and the ones covering Mittagong-Nattai and Wollondilly-Macarthur are very useful, and will give you plenty of walk ideas. I'm not sure where you'd get them, possibly try the Campbelltown Visitor Centre? The Picton Visitor Centre used to have them, but it was flooded out a few years ago, and I haven't been into it since.

A few suggestions in brief:
Tahmoor Gorge- About 40mins drive to the south, it's a very impressive gorge, and really nice walk. There's a sketch map floating around on the internet.
60ft Falls and Nattai River- Another loop walk (about an hour to the south), and can be done by train (Mittagong station). The falls are quite impressive, and you can easily extend this walk by going further down the Nattai or up to Box Vale Lookout.
Starlights Trail- This is a walk down into impressive sandstone country out from Hill Top (a small town part way between Mittagong and Tahmoor). It's a nice overnighter, but can be done as a daywalk. Not a loop walk though, but there are options to extend it into one. Probably an hours drive from Mount Annan.
Also deserving a mention is Aherns Lookout, which is in the same area. It doesn't quite fit your criteria (out and back, only 10km) but has astounding views.

Dharwal NP is also a good walking location- it's close at about half an hours drive to the east. But I'm not really familiar with the park myself.
The Glenbrook precinct of the Blue Mountains NP is also just under an hours drive (or at least with the ridiculous amount of roadworks on the Northern Road at the moment). There's some excellent walks here, Wildwalks and Bushwalking NSW have plenty of suggestions.

If you're looking for a daily walk, check out the Mount Annan Botanic gardens. It's a fantastic garden anyway, and although it's hardly remote there's a network of trails you could go for a wander around on.

But, yeah, once you start venturing further afield, there's heaps of options. Bungonia NP has some fantastic gorge country, and is about 1.5h to the south. It's about the same time drive to Katoomba, Wentworth Falls or Blackheath, which gets you access to the heart of the Blue Mountains.

[michael_p]

Hi Oldlock,

Welcome to the Big M (Macarthur that is). I'm over on the eastern side of the area.

There are a surprising number of short walking opportunities along the Georges River at Kentlyn. The Old Ford Rd, The Basin, Freres Crossing and a network of fire trails with side tracks down to the River behind the water tower. Some excellent mountain bikes trails down along Peter Meadow Ck (but keep this quiet as they are a secret).

Plenty of good suggestions from Laclhan. It might be worth giving the Visitor Information Centre in Picton a call, as they do normally have the Sloss books. His books are a good introduction to a number of walks.

Dharawal NP has lots of old tracks but they are not described anywhere. I have done a lot of walks around Dharawal by studying old maps and aerial photos. A number of once easy routes are now thick scrub so some caution is required when exploring this NP.

Heathcote NP is another good option and several walks are described on the wildwalks website. Both Heathcote and the Royal National Park are easy to get to via Appin. Both would be around the hour mark.

If you are interested in Nattai NP there are several threads on this site about walking in the Nattai.

It may be a over an hours drive but don't discount the middle and upper Blue Mountains. So many great walks.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

Regards,
Michael.

[tom_brennan]

Within an hour's drive to the south west, you have access to Nattai National Park. Here's a list of some of the walks, some of which can be connected up to form loops.
http://bushwalkingnsw.com/park.php?nid=137

Also within an hour's drive are the lower Blue Mountains - from Glenbrook, up to about Springwood/Faulconbridge. The south side of the highway is known as the Blue Labyrinth area:
http://bushwalkingnsw.com/region.php?nid=988
You can also access the some parts of the lower Grose River eg http://bushwalkingnsw.com/walk.php?nid=241

There's also the Royal and Heathcote - plenty of ideas there from just looking at tracks on the maps online eg http://maps.ozultimate.com/

It's also worth buying the 2 NPA walking guides (now only available as eBooks?)
http://bushwalk.com/store/catalog/produ ... ucts_id/66
http://bushwalk.com/store/catalog/produ ... ucts_id/67 (not sure why it's at Edition 3, when the last printed version was at Edition 6?)
While some of the tracks may be out of date, they have a lot of info/ideas and handy maps.

[oldlock]

Thanks for the many excellent ideas. I pushed the boat out this morning and went up to the Grand Canyon loop (short but spectacular) I did the side trip to the Beauchamp falls and the trail seemed to continue on but lacking data I went back and finished the loop. All in all enjoyable although the round trip drive was a lot longer than I wished.

I will consider the parks to the south east and start to explore the trails of NSW.

[LachlanB]

I'm glad you enjoyed your walk; that area of the Grose is fantastic walking country!

The track does continue, and for data you can look at the NSW Government Topo maps here: http://maps.six.nsw.gov.au
Click 'Basemaps', then click 'Looking for 1943 imagery?', then click on the 'Topo Maps (current)' option, and then select it to get the Topo Maps. The NSW topo maps aren't completely accurate though- many tracks are missing on them, or mis-aligned, and some marked tracks are completely overgrown. On the plus side, around Sydney many of the tracks have been documented online in some form, so finding more info about them usually isn't too bad.

[rcaffin]

The Blue Labyrinth ... experienced walkers usually avoid this area completely. The scrub is a bit extreme. The tracks shown on the topos are a little overgrown. (Little is an understatement.)

Cheers
Roger

[LachlanB]

The Blue Labyrinth ... experienced walkers usually avoid this area completely.

I can't help but wonder about this every time I scoot past Glenbrook on my way to Wentworth Falls or anywhere else in the Upper Mountains. Is the area due a bit of revisiting? The Blue Labyrinth has certainly come up in a couple of threads lately...

[tom_brennan]

The Blue Labyrinth ... experienced walkers usually avoid this area completely. The scrub is a bit extreme. The tracks shown on the topos are a little overgrown. (Little is an understatement.

There are plenty of routes in the Blue Labyrinth that are worthwhile, and scrub free or light scrub.

- Glenbrook Gorge (Glenbrook to Lapstone)
- Erskine Creek (Jack Evans Track, Pisgah Rock, Dadder Cave, Blands Pool)
- Kanuka Brook, Red Hands Cave, Crayfish Pool
- Glenbrook to Warrimoo (via Glenbrook Creek and Florabella Pass)
- Glenbrook to Springwood via St Helena Crater
- the various tracks south of Faulconbridge and Springwood (Magdala Creek, Sassafras Creek)
- link tracks like the Bullant Track

And that's just the section of the Blue Labyrinth up to Woodford Range. Yes, there are plenty of scrubby areas, but no reason to avoid the area completely.