Everything you need to know about upgrades to Adelaide’s Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit trail

Everything you need to know about upgrades to Adelaide’s Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit trail



Adelaide’s most pop­u­lar walk­ing trail is even bet­ter – and safer – than before. Here’s what you can expect.


More than 600,000 peo­ple use the Water­fall Gul­ly to Mount Lofty Sum­mit trail every year, mak­ing it one of the most pop­u­lar walk­ing trails in the state.

The trail is rat­ed Grade 4. It starts at Water­fall Gul­ly in Adelaide’s east­ern sub­urbs and is in the Cle­land Nation­al Park.

Its attrac­tive­ness is no sur­prise; you can chal­lenge your­self (or not!) on the hike and there are cafes at each end, scenic water­falls in between and stun­ning views of the city at the summit.

The trail was exten­sive­ly dam­aged by flood­ing and land­slides dur­ing severe storms in late 2016, mak­ing it too dan­ger­ous to use until emer­gency repairs were car­ried out.

Major restora­tion works aimed to future-proof the trail by upgrad­ing sur­faces and board­walks so they could bet­ter with­stand storm events and be able to meet grow­ing demand from trail users.

So what has been done to the trail?

It has a safer, more durable surface

The trail now has about 3km of exposed aggre­gate con­crete. This has replaced the pre­vi­ous unsealed rub­ble sur­face, which was not robust enough for this envi­ron­ment and terrain.

A stan­dard con­crete sur­face is durable but can be slip­pery, but the new aggre­gate sur­face has grav­el chips par­tial­ly exposed, pro­vid­ing extra slip resis­tance and toughness.

Everything you need to know about upgrades to Adelaide’s Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit trail

This work used about 1600 tonnes of con­crete, of which about 200 tonnes was deliv­ered by heli­copter because of the access issues for machin­ery. The heli­copter made 30 to 40 lifts per day.

Everything you need to know about upgrades to Adelaide’s Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit trail

You won’t get your feet wet – unless you want to!

There’s 220m of ele­vat­ed board­walks over creek lines and bog­gy areas such as Wilsons Bog, one of the largest swamps in the Mt Lofty Ranges. 

The board­walks were built using fibre-rein­forced plas­tic struc­tur­al com­po­nents and anti-slip mesh deck­ing – handy dur­ing winter.

Everything you need to know about upgrades to Adelaide’s Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit trail

The creek banks are bet­ter protected

About 60m of erod­ed creek banks were rein­stat­ed with rock-filled gabion bas­kets to pro­vide pro­tec­tion from scour­ing by fast-flow­ing water dur­ing storms.

Exten­sive reveg­e­ta­tion works have also been under­tak­en along the trail.

You can learn more while walking

New signs have been installed to pro­vide direc­tions and high­light the land­scape and the wildlife that lives there.

Everything you need to know about upgrades to Adelaide’s Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit trail

Along the trail there’s also break­out areas with bench­es for those who need a rest or want to enjoy the view, and a new board­walk and look­out con­nec­tion with the exist­ing Har­ford Trail.

Everything you need to know about upgrades to Adelaide’s Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Summit trail

About the upgrade project

The project was com­plex and there were sev­er­al chal­lenges, includ­ing the fact that the trail was nar­row and now unsta­ble in places.

But for reg­u­lar trail users, the para­mount issue was that this Ade­laide insti­tu­tion remain open as much as pos­si­ble so they could con­tin­ue to tack­le their much-loved 3.9km-each-way hike.

Restora­tion work began in Jan­u­ary 2018 and was com­plet­ed in May this year. For most of the $5 mil­lion project, pub­lic access was main­tained on week­ends, and through the use of detours around con­struc­tion sites on week­days. There were only three weeks dur­ing which week­day access was not pos­si­ble because there were no safe alter­na­tive routes.

Want to know about oth­er ways to get to the sum­mit? Read our sto­ry:14 oth­er ways to walk to Adelaide’s Mount Lofty Sum­mit.


This con­tent was pro­duced in part­ner­ship with  Good Living