Adventure Time: Grand Canyon Loop & Lake Burragorang

Near Blackheath NSW
Time: 2 hours
Distance: 7km loop

This beautiful lush rainforest walk is well known and well publicised as one of the best attractions in the mountains.

We had a kid free weekend so Richie and I were able to enjoy this snowy(!) day in peace. This loop walk is jaw droppingly beautiful; prehistoric in its scale, and lush green everywhere you look.

There's so much information online about this walk that I'll just share some photos and skip all the details. Suffice to say there's a hell of a lot of stairs up and down, but the views are totally worth it.

On our way back down the mountains, we stopped for a moment to check out the walk to Lake Burrogorang lookout overlooking Warragamba Dam.

This walk is about 2.5km from the parking area at the end of Kings Tableland Rd.

It was absolutely freezing by this stage - we'd got warm walking around Blackheath then cooled down so I was well and truly frozen when we got out of the car again! But, it was a quickish walk (30 min or so) and I'd been wanting to check out this lookout for a while.

Technically called McMahons Lookout, there is a great view of the expanse that is the Kanangra Boyd national park and the wilderness beyond Lake Burragorang.

This important and wild place is in danger of being drowned, and inundated with silt and runoff if plans to raise the dam wall are given the green light.

Raising the dam wall will encourage massive over development on flood-prone areas in Penrith, Londonderry, Riverstone and Windsor. The NSW Government plans to house an additional 134,000 people on western Sydney floodplains after the dam wall is raised. Sydney's west is simply not equipped to deal with the knock on effects of hundreds of thousands of extra people and consequently the elimination of our natural flood safety nets, the low lying floodplain basins in the Hawkesbury and Penrith. They are there for a reason and perform their role of flood mitigation naturally and ethically. Some long-established homes are already subject to flooding, but to top it off, raising the dam wall by 14 metres is unlikely to actually prevent any flooding to all these shiny new homes crushed into the lowlands.

Read more about why this plan is so shitty at Give A Dam.

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Mummy, my legs hurt

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