The 19-kilometre Grand Cliff Top Walk is the first major hiking trail project in Australia's Blue Mountains to open in 70 years.Remy Brand/Destination NSW
Window seat passengers flying into Sydney from the west – that is, coming in across the vast continent of Australia – can’t miss the Blue Mountains National Park.
Viewed from above, this part of the east coast’s 3,500-kilometre Great Dividing Range appears as a knotted-wool carpet of treetops, rippled by ridges and valleys, and cleft by sheer sandstone cliffs that, at sunset, blush an improbable apricot-pink. The 15 or so villages strung along the main road that ascends to the highest altitude town, Mount Victoria, are barely visible amid a sprawling wilderness carved with the world’s highest concentration of vegetated slot canyons, teeming with ancient rain forest plants.
Tangalooma is the Brisbane beach resort only the locals know about
Passing over, planes are already in descent, with touchdown in the harbour city around 15 minutes later. The lower Blue Mountains are only one hour by train or car from Sydney, while the upper part (where the best hikes are) is 1½ to two hours.
Many cities boast of having nature enviably close, but Sydney owns the throne with the Royal National Park to the south, Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north and the Greater Blue Mountains UNESCO World Heritage Area to the west. This one-million hectare area contains seven national parks on the traditional land of six First Nations: Darkinjung, Dharawal, Dharug, Gundungurra, Wonnarua and Wiradjuri.
One of these parks, Wollemi National Park, is named after the Wollemi pine: a “dinosaur tree” that thrived 90 million years ago. Botanists thought it was extinct until an off-duty ranger stumbled on a grove in 1994. The location remains a secret, and a high-stakes conservation project today.
The Grand Cliff Top Walk will take hikers to several sites, including waterfalls.Remy Brand/Destination NSW
I grew up in the Blue Mountains and was in Grade 12 when the grove was found. Teenagers being teenagers, there was dumb talk of finding it, which would’ve been both illegal and morally inexcusable given that human disturbance is the Cretaceous era tree’s biggest threat. During the gruelling six months of Australia’s catastrophic Black Summer (2019-2020), when more than 24 million hectares burned, a fear spread that the grove was incinerated. But some heroic firefighting had (mostly) saved it; a spark of hope in a dark time.
I left the Blue Mountains when I was 18 to attend university, just south of Sydney. My parents stayed in our century-old weatherboard home. So my bond with the region stayed constant.
As a kid, the occasional whisking of British relatives to see kangaroos was the extent of my family’s nature excursions. Back then, multiday walks were for “bushies”: people who knew how to handle a tarp, a Trangia stove and a map. People who called dirt in their food “bush pepper.” Even after I married a Californian who introduced me to bushwalking (hiking), my visits out west were social catch-ups before I zipped back to my busy Sydney life.
The hike spans two days and begins at Wentworth Falls.Daniel Parsons/Destination NSW
In 2024, the two-day, 19-kilometre Grand Cliff Top Walk opened, the first major hiking trail project in the Blue Mountains in 70 years, costing nearly $10-million. By then, I’d become a confident hiker, completing multiday walks in Tasmania, Western Australia and Victoria to write feature articles, mainly during the closed borders of Australia’s early pandemic era. It was time to take my boots home.
Right on cue, it starts to drizzle as I arrive at Wentworth Falls picnic area where day one (11 kilometres) of the Grand Cliff Top Walk – which links Wentworth Falls, Leura and Katoomba – begins. Yet as a believer in the maxim “hell is other people,” I note there’s no other hikers here. Australians are spooked by rain, so tolerance for a few drops means serenity on the trail.
When I hear the melodic gurgles of a currawong bird glide into a kookaburra’s mocking laugh and flip into the whip-crack call of an eastern whipbird, I realize it’s a single superb lyrebird in the bush beneath. The lyrebird is a master mimic, and described by David Attenborough in a BBC documentary as “the most elaborate, the most complex, the most beautiful song in the world.” It does car alarms and chainsaws, too, and even the fruitless ding-ding-ding of someone hammering a tent peg into too-hard ground.
Day one was 11 kilometres while day two was eight kilometres on the trail.Remy Brand/Destination NSW
A National Parks and Wildlife Service discovery ranger, Greg Davis, joins me, along with my friend Loretta Doolan, a birder. She is not only knowledgeable about birds, I discover, as we start walking through spiky banksia scrub and hanging swamps of coral fern. “We might see a spotted doubletail today,” Davis says. “Is that a bird?” I ask. “Orchid,” they reply in unison – and laugh at the evident kinship.
Both days (day two is eight kilometres from Leura to Katoomba) are a blur of cliffsides, caves, canyons and a diversity of ecosystems. The lookouts deliver hit after hit. The 10-kilometre-wide Jamison Valley views make your head spin with their immensity but the stonework of the lookouts is a delight of craftsmanship, too.
Australia’s most famous botanical export, the eucalyptus tree, varies here from towering mountain ash to fragrant Sydney peppermint gum and strawberry gum. The trunks of the scribbly gums are etched with obtuse hieroglyphics by a moth, while the stringybarks shed their skin striptease-style to reveal tender new flesh, leaving a pile of bark nearby like flung-off clothes.
The trail marker logo is of a wumbarrung (the Gundungurra word for the yellow-tailed black cockatoo), but it’s the glossy black cockatoo, with its red tail, that Davis wants to see. They feed exclusively on she-oak tree nuts and can often be heard crunching above before they’re seen. “It can take 300 years for a tree hollow to form that’s big enough to fit a cockatoo,” Davis says.
The eucalyptus tree can be seen here in various forms, from tall mountain ash to fragrant Sydney peppermint gum and strawberry gum.Daniel Parsons/Destination NSW
We stop to watch the navy-blue shadows of clouds glide across the valley, as Davis explains the region’s namesake colour: “When sunlight passes through eucalypt mist, it mostly emits blue.” I remember learning that as a kid.
The silence is nice when we stop for lunch. The Golden Wattle tree (Australia’s national floral emblem) is in boisterous bloom, its fluffy firework-bursts of startling yellow everywhere, and its caramel smell, too. After eating, we rest on our packs and, in stillness, I realize that the synthetic rustle of raincoats and the clack of packs while hiking has been drowning out the aural details.
Eyes closed, memories of my childhood are carried back on the sounds I hadn’t noticed earlier, such as the melancholic note of wind in the needle-like she-oak leaves, and the screeches of a faraway flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos, reverberating across the valley.
If you go
Katoomba, where the hike ends, is the area’s largest town. It’s 1,017 metres above sea level and the temperature can drop to zero degrees in winter (June-August).
Walks in Australia are graded from one to five. One is wheelchair-accessible and five is for experienced bushwalkers. The Grand Cliff Top Walk is ranked at three: suitable for most ages and fitness levels. Early morning and late afternoon is best for bird life – you won’t be disappointed.
The NSW National Parks app has maps, track notes and audio guides. Download the trail map to view it without cellphone coverage.
Chalets at Blackheath feature four sunlit suites with a fireplace and bathrub inside each.Destination NSW
Where to sleep: Chalets at Blackheath have four luxurious, light-filled suites immersed in nature. Inside, each room has a fireplace and a bathtub, and outside, a communal fire pit. Native nibbles such as macadamia nuts, lilly pilly and Muntrie berries are offered. Self-contained chalets start from $1,190 per night. chaletsblackheath.com.au
The Blue Mountains Sauna in Leura is a communal spa suited for post-hike relaxation.Declan Blackall/Destination NSW
After the hike, soak those muscles in a local spa: Blue Mountains Sauna in Leura is a communal Finnish-style sauna and cold plunge with a convivial vibe, outdoor seating and a fire pit. Aqua/Ignis bathhouse in Blackheath is more luxe and less crowded with a eucalyptus steam room to bring the trail scents right back.
The writer was a guest of Destination NSW. It did not review or approve the story before publication.