Buck30 - Other Trail Journal - 2026

Planning notes & summary

Here's a quick summary of the Heysen Trail and some planning help for
future hikers. Keep in mind, these are just my opinions, you might have
different opinions!

Given that there is a decent amount of info out there on the Heysen I've
kept the summary below short (ie, fairly minimal effort on my part for this
one).

Overall

We both enjoyed the Heysen a good bit. It's not in the top tier of amazing
things we've hiked, but it was a solid good trail. If I had to stack rank
it against the other best long trails in Australia I'd say it's up there
with the Bibbulmum. The Heysen would be the harder, more challenging, think
more for yourself trail that's also very scenic and interesting. The
Bibbulmum would be the much easier one with more hikers but also very
scenic and interesting. I think the Australian Alps Walking Track would be
below both of these and then the Larapinta is beautiful but only 130 miles
and apparently very expensive to hike these days. Id highly recommend the
Heysen as part of a long trip to Australia. I probably wouldn't beg someone
to come over to Australia just for the Heysen, but it's a great trail to be
part of a group of trails on a longer trip.

Difficulty

The Heysen wasn't particularly hard for us, but apparently it's known for
being fairly hard. Most of the walking is fairly easy and straightforward.

The hard parts are mostly the famous "Walker Follow Fence" markers. The
trail makes miles by using an extraordinary amount of fencelines to follow.
Like it doesn't ever go cross country across anything in a more practical
or efficient way, it has you follow a fenceline kinda as a handrail for
navigation as well as I believe this is the main way they get to cross
private property. Basically they tell the rancher that hikers won't cross
their property, they will just follow this fenceline on the edge. The
upside of fencelines is they frequently have a worn in path from the sheep
which acts a bit like a trail. The downside of fencelines is they don't
always follow a logical path for hiking and you'll find yourself going very
steeply up and down the hillsides following the Fenceline. Or there will be
no worn in track and the footing will be terrible in long lumpy grasses.

The other harder sections are the Walkers Follow Creek markers which is
mostly in the northern third of the trail where you just follow a creek bed
as the trail. These can range from very wide to pretty narrow and from
pretty decent walking to very rocky and tedious walking. Although difficult
at times these were also some of the most interesting and scenic miles.

There are some days that are pretty hilly but you'd probably be hard
pressed to do more than 4,000' in a day unless you are doing pretty big
miles. And some of the hills can be quite steep. They aren't super into
switchbacks. In fact, there really isn't a lot of singletrack built for the
Heysen. It seems like the South Australia government mostly ignores the
Heysen and the Friends of the Heysen are the ones that do any work on the
trail, but they don't have a lot of funding. Therefore sometimes when a
trail is needed, it's just like some steep sheep trail going down a steep
hillside with good pole markers along the way.

The other main difficulty I can think of would be camping and the wind. See
the camping section below for more on that.

Oh, and the stiles. You will climb over a million stiles. But they are
impressively built pretty much all of them.

Resources

We used the FarOut app. It's pretty good for the Heysen although I was
still surprised by how often the track still wasn't perfect. But it
generally wasn't off enough to cause a real navigation issue. The waypoints
in the app are mostly limited to campsites and water which is really all
you need.

The Friends of the Heysen trail has a website than lists closures that you
should check occasionally, but otherwise there isn't a lot of other info
you need. If you also want to use your own GPS app the website has a good
gpx track you can download.

Sections

Basically you've got a large northern section through the Flinders Ranges
that I thought was fantastic. Once you've left that you have a very large
section (like 60% or more of the trail) that is mostly farmland, grazing
land and then wine country. These areas can be very pretty but are
definitely the less spectacular parts of the Heysen. Then you enter the
Adelaide Hills which are a lot of pine plantations and conservation parks
with eucalyptus forest and finally you have about 3 days of beautiful
rugged hiking along the southern ocean to the finish.

Water

We drank almost no natural water on the entire hike. All of the water comes
from the rainwater tanks at the campsites or shelters. Or in towns. These
tanks have been installed over the years and are quite great. A fair number
of them even have sensors on them that update the percent full online to
check. Given how wet our season was these were always very full and the
water was always good. They are pretty well spaced apart, I can't recall
the longest carry but it wasn't very far. Especially given it was winter we
were not drinking a ton of water. There's the occasional creek, stock pond
or sheep trough but you really don't need these.

Season/Weather

We hiked in the dead of the Australian winter and it was a lot colder than
we expected. We had a lot of days with highs in the upper 40s and lows
around freezing. And then there's the wind, apparently the Heysen is pretty
well known for having a lot of wind. And then sometimes the clouds/fog were
really low making it even colder. I'm sure this is a bit anecdotal, but it
seemed like we'd have a week of dry weather and then there would be a 4 day
storm system and then that cycle would repeat itself. But even the dry
weather at times was cold and foggy. We were pretty lucky/skilled to time
most of the rain with town stays and by the end we really hadn't had a lot
of rain while actually walking, but at the same time we felt like we had a
cold winter hike.

If we did it again we'd probably try and hike closer to a shoulder season
to have warmer weather. Everyone is so freaked out about it being too hot
no one ever talks about it being too cold.

The trail of course is basically closed from April - October for bushfire
season and during those months it probably would be too hot anyways.

Resupply

Resupply was fine on the Heysen. Early on in the north there were a few
smaller, more expensive resupplies, but nothing crazy. And by the middle
and then especially the end it felt like we were resupplying in large good
groceries mostly. There's no need to send any resupply boxes or anything.
I'm not going to list anything in detail here. FarOut has all the towns and
usually there is a comment about the resupply. There is also a PDF in the
files section of the Facebook group that is helpful (Heysen Trail E2E &
Through Hiking). We spent almost no cash the entire trip and just paid for
everything with tap on our phone. You might only need cash to get some
change for laundry occasionally.

Camping

Camping is pretty awful on the Heysen if you have bad weather and
especially if it's windy which it usually is. The campsites are almost
always in terribly exposed places, to the point where they are even placed
right on top of a ridgeline or hill in the most exposed spot remotely
possible. I think this is mainly due to just where the public authority (SA
Water or conservation park, etc.) or private landowner would allow a
campsite to be placed. I can't imagine the Friends of the Heysen would have
chosen most of these sites. Even when there is forest, it's usually
eucalyptus which grows high and provides minimal protection. There's
typically very little low/thick brush that would provide wind protection.

There are a number of shelters along the way ranging from some sort of old
but rebuilt homestead to a tiny little shack. We stayed in 8 of them and
luckily no one else ever showed up which is probably a bit unusual. They
are just supposed to be for Heysen hikers so generally speaking you won't
have others or only the odd Heysen hiker here and there.

Whatever tent you bring I'd recommend something that stands strong in the
wind.

Technically there is basically no legal camping other than the official
campsites. But it seems to be fairly common for hikers to random camp in
the National Parks without much problem. But this is mostly only at the
beginning. Hikers also seem to camp in Conservation Parks too which
definitely isn't legal but sometimes you just need a place to camp. Ditto
for the Forest Reserves/pine plantation in the Adelaide Hills. The one
place to really avoid is just all the private property farmland and grazing
land which makes up a lot of the trail. If you are going to camp on private
land make sure it's not private land the trail is currently going through,
if you get caught that farmer might revoke the easement and you'll ruin it
for everyone. We almost never camped on private land but like the 2 times
we very discreetly did we joked that at least it wasn't land the trail was
going through (it was just private land off a public dirt road which was
the trail at the time) and therefore we couldn't ruin anything for anyone.
But generally speaking it's best to just never camp on private land. There
really are a lot of campsites although it's still hard to piece together a
daily plan when you can only camp in sites that are spaced apart every 7-10
miles or something like that. A few times we stayed in a hotel in town as
that just made the camping easier and was also more enjoyable.

Dangers

Really nothing. Given it was winter we never saw a snake and never really
thought much about it. Didn't really see any spiders either.

Gear

A tent for the wind is the only thing that really comes to mind as I
mentioned above. Enough clothes to stay warm and a sleeping bag warm enough
too. I can't think of anything unusual to bring outside of normal 3 season
gear.

Wildlife

Tons of kangaroos and they always brought a smile to my face (wallaby's
too). The occasional emu too which are great. And then the birds of
Australia are just fantastic. New Zealand is always promoting their birds,
but I've always thought that Australia was even better. In particular the
cockatoos screetching all over, the small parrots and lorikeets, the
magpies are constantly around singing their song and the kookaburra was fun
to listen too. We didn't see a koala, echidna or wombat which we wanted to
see.

Bugs

Some mosquitos occasionally but nothing crazy. None of the bush flies
Australia is famous for. Overall not much of anything.

Cell service

We both got Telstra prepaid plans with an e-sim. Pretty cheap at around $ 35
US and plenty of data (especially since there usually is a sale or
something that includes bonus data for a few months). We had tons of cell
reception, not all the time but certainly everyday.

Permits

Nothing really. The National Park coastal campsites have to be booked/fee
at the southern end and there are some other random campsites that need to
be booked if you choose to use them (other National Parks or Forest
Reserves).

Other hikers

We saw very few other hikers. We saw Heysen hikers like 3 times total and
rarely anyone else backpacking or even day hiking. It seemed like there
were definitely others on the trail, we just didn't really see many.

How to Get to the Start and Finish

Getting to the northern start is expensive. You basically have to take a
bus from Adelaide to Port Augusta which is easy and runs several times a
day. Then you have to take a private shuttle that's like $ 125 a person to
get to the northern end. Check the Facebook group for shuttle providers
(right now it appears there are 2 different people doing it, one business
at the end that just does it once a week on Wednesday's and another guy
that does it maybe 3x a week - but these things tend to change). Hitching
all the way to the end I'm sure is technically possible, but would be a
huge pain. Hikers seem to post to the FB group asking if anyone is going up
that way and occasionally seem to be successful, but that's probably very
lucky.

The end is much easier, there's a once daily morning public bus from Cape
Jervis to Adelaide that's 2.5 hours.

Entry 69 of 69
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