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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.