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Our Tour Overview: With this particularly newly upgraded trail (2024), Nature Trail as adopted its own unique approach to offering it as a potential hiking tour at this early stage. We initially consider it to be a new hiking concept of variable forest trek experience from Katoomba to Wentworth Falls. It’s overall length is over at least 20 km […]
This 19+km trek is officially promoted equivalent to a proverbial ‘walk in the park’ as being do-able in just 2-days… like ‘easy peasy’? Yet, from our on-ground hiking experience of this trail, it seriously is anything but! The (NPWS) Parks Service’s March 2024 public opening launch of its new concept ‘Grand Cliff Top Walk‘ in the Australian Blue Mountains, […]
In the Australian Blue Mountains, during the cooler months of June and July 2025, Nature Trail’s Tour Director, Steve Ridd, has decided to undertake a series of segmented practice reconnoitre trips (‘recces’) of the recently and mostly upgraded and renamed amalgamated hiking tracks branded the ‘Grand Cliff Top Walk‘. This track is situated in the central upper Blue Mountains Region, […]
On Friday morning 4th July 2025, we chose our recce of this particular segment of the Grand Cliff Top Walk from Leura Cascades Picnic Reserve to Echo Point Lookout. The above vista is conveniently accessible on a short side track off Grand Cliff Top Walk trail. However, in frustration we discovered that Leura Cascades is still completely closed off to the […]
Blue Mountains {city} Council seems focused on pedestrian safety of late, finally. This is a positive development for the benefit of improving the safety of locals and visitors alike. So, we note new speed humps in Katoomba town centre area. However, none of which are actual speed humps that require vehicles to slow down without experiencing the most minor of […]
Blue Mountain’s Council Mayor Mark Greenhill has presided over perpetual hiking track closures since February 2020, and it’s nearly two years on. Leura Cascades was closed in February 2020 during a known and predictable La Niña period heavy rainfall weather pattern which deluged the east coast of New South Wales including the Blue Mountains region. Substandard stormwater drainage brought on a […]
Here we go again… Bushfires lockdown the entire Blue Mountains The widespread bushfire ‘mega-blaze‘ disaster of Christmas 2019 that was mishandled and allowed to rage and spread over two months, ended up destroying 80 percent of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area as well as many other natural regions of New South Wales. Dubbed by our sister conservation entity […]
Fifty buses a day – huge tourist coaches and mini-buses – concentrate on retail Leura Mall. It’s crazy and unfair. Bus congestion dominates Leura daily due to corporate tourism promotion of the Blue Mountains and specifically Leura to encourage the inbound tourist trade. But has Leura’s retail, attractions and accommodation benefitted? No. A local council traffic survey of just 200 […]
Tragically, just before midday smoko on Wednesday 29th November 2017, three contractors with the NSW NPWS (Parks Service) were suddenly struck by a boulder fall from some 10 metres above them. They were repairing a cliff section along the historic National Pass in the Blue Mountains National Park at Wentworth Falls. These were the boulders. At the time of the […]