Australians have been walking the trails of the Blue Mountains for up to 40,000 years, but it’s taken the Grand Cliff Top Walk to finally have ROAM following in their footsteps.
Two hours west of Sydney, this “new” walk through Gundungurra country takes you around the Jamison Valley escarpment, a stunning sandstone canyon 250 million years old and filled with ancient atmospherics, pioneer sites and natural wonders.
The Grand Cliff Top Walk is the most famous of NSW National Parks’ Great Walks, which take in the Snowies Alpine Walk around Kosciuszko (55km), Tomaree Coastal Walk (20km) in Port Stephens, the Gidjuum Gulganyi Walk (39km) through the Byron Hinterland, the Murramarang Walk (34km) traversing the south coast, the Sapphire Coast’s Light to Light Walk (34km) and the Green Gully Track (65km) across the Northern Tablelands.
But with all its wild waterfalls and spectacular lookouts, the snaking 19km trail linking Wentworth Falls, Leura and Katoomba is the most magnificent of the seven. The National Parks and Wildlife Service recommends splitting it into a two-day walk: day one starting at Wentworth Falls and finishing at Gordon Falls in Leura (11km, 5-7 hours), day two from Gordon Falls to the famous Three Sisters at Katoomba (8km, 4-5 hours). Or do it in reverse.
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We’re spending the weekend at a family friend’s bush shack in the tiny hamlet of Medlow Bath, home to the Hydro Majestic Hotel, once a deluxe health and hedonism retreat for the jet set, now a hotel in need of new owners as it caters to busloads of tourists. From there we jump a train to Wentworth Falls and cross the highway to Wilson Park, where a sweeping sandstone gateway welcomes us to the Grand Cliff Top Walk.
Blue Mountains National Park, NSW Credit: The Nightly
This is a grade 3 hike — “suitable for most ages and fitness levels, though some bushwalking experience is recommended” — and the early stages are leisurely, following Fairy Falls Creek through grasslands flecked with cobalt blue fairy wrens. It’s a misty June morning and we’re snugly dressed but the new track — a mix of steel grating, sandstone footfalls and quartzy dirt — is Converse and Blundstone-friendly.
The signposts guiding us, each bearing the emblem of the track, a Wumbarrung black cockatoo designed by Gundungurra artist Kelsie King, are new. But the path is old, forged in the late 1800s by legendary local ranger Peter Mulheran and his trailblazers using pick, shovel and the occasional stick of dynamite. Their water wells, sleepers and stone ovens can be seen as we duck under a long curving ledge.
Waterfalls line the Grand Cliff Top Walk. Credit: The Nightly
This next leg, past Wentworth Falls and Empress Falls, is dotted with epic lookouts and tinkling cascades. The valley today carries a veil of fog but it’s a good place to ponder what early explorers once called “a dreadful convulsion of nature” full of “horrible perpendicular mountains” that were “impassable to men”. After 10 failed expeditions between 1789 and 1806, the mountains were crossed in 1813.
The trio who did it — William Lawson, Gregory Blaxland and William Wentworth — not only lent their names to Blue Mountain towns but established a path Charles Darwin walked in 1836. The “father of evolution” admired “stupendous cliffs” overlooking a “grand valley” full of “blue mist from rising sun” and painted in “magnificent parrots”. It’s all still here, even more accessible, whispering stories thousands of years older.
Bushland surrounds the Blue Mountains trail. Credit: The Nightly
Birdsong leads us home on day one. A superb lyrebird, shaking 16 tailfeathers, zigzags ahead as we climb out of the valley and exit the trail behind the Fairmont Resort and Leura golf course. We’ve made the 11km trip in under four hours, despite lots of stairs and steep climbs that saw us stripped down to T-shirts. The hard part of the walk is done, and it was glorious. Only the 8km Leura-Katoomba leg awaits.
Next day, aching a little but exhilarated by the alpine air and another curtain of fog, we pick up the trail by walking from the train station down the pretty main drag of Leura. The wattlebirds and shrubwrens shriek greetings and dew glistens on the flowers, little red mountain devils and big yellow banksias dusted in deep purple. It could be the pepper pie or caffeine but the first few kilometres float by in a dream.
The Three Sisters are justly iconic and given we’re walking on air and the track is level, it’s nice to meander, admiring each bluff and gorge. We creep up via a sidetrack at Spooners Lookout, pausing at Honeymoon Bridge. And by the time Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo — three sisters frozen in stone by a witchdoctor after falling in love with three boys from a neighbouring tribe — come into view, we’re as high as they are. nationalparks.nsw.gov.au
