The Eighth Gorge Trail is the longest of the Southern Walks that follow the sandstone escarpments and savannah woodlands around Katherine Gorge in Nitmiluk National Park. The national park is managed in part by the Jawoyn Aboriginal people, the traditional owners of the Katherine region, and detours around a rock art site, croc-free swimming holes and pant-shitting lookouts.

Unless you’re driving up from Alice, you’ll have to start this trip in Darwin. Fistfight your way to a car rental joint on Mitchell St, get yourself a Yaris and head for Katherine. The Nitmiluk National Park Visitor’s Centre is about a half-hour drive from town. Register your walk, pay camping fees and give the Yaris a farewell kick right in its stupid face.

The Southern Walks are a network of trails that begin with easy day walks and lookouts, and extend deeper into the national park for overnighters. Following the general rule in the top end, most of the grey nomads bail out after about 1 kilometre, and you’re almost certain to have the track to yourself after 5.

The trail is mostly a sandstone path that winds through savannah grasslands and stone country, through groves of pandanus and cycad palms. The first campsite is at Dunlop Swamp, although it’s probably better to stay here on your return. The swamp is a marshy pocket of melaleucas and grevillea trees, and if it’s early enough in the morning, you can slurp the dewy nectar on low-flowering grevillea blossoms while being eviscerated by one billion mosquitoes.

We continued along the path to set up camp at Smitt Rock, a clifftop camping spot near the fifth gorge of the Katherine River. There’s a drop dunny and an emergency call device here. The views across the high sandstone ramparts will make you make a sound like those groan tube toys. You can take a short rock scramble trail down to the water’s edge and a little sandy swimming beach. Freshwater crocs, turtles and overnight kayakers stop by, but they’re pretty chill.

The next part of the trail winds up into tablelands, where levees of sandstone wick up water from the last wet season and the woodlands stay green for months. Passing some of the taller stringybarks and Darwin woolly butt trees, you can see pods of interlocking leaves stitched with green ants’ silk. The nests are good for making a curative drink that tastes a little like lime.

There’s an option to follow a loop trail that leads past Jawoyn Valley rock art sites. We ditched our backpacks by the water tank and ate sangas under the paintings in a weathered sandstone grotto.

The last campsite, Eighth Gorge, is the top end’s zion. We pitched our tents by a small sandy swimming hole backed by a cliff and shaded by melaleucas. There’s a toilet, emergency call device and resident cormorant here, as well as a path that leads to the gorge and a terrifying vertical precipice where you can cook dinner and take rap squat photos. Another path skirts the cliff and brings you down to a sandy shore of the Katherine River.

The return leg of the trip is about 17 kilometres and can be split into two days with a stopover at Dunlop Swamp. We slogged it in one day and replenished our fluids with beer and Frosty Fruits at an emotional reunion with the Yaris at the Visitor’s Centre.

For a side trip, head to Leliyn (Edith Falls), about 42km north of Katherine, and eat barramundi burgers and scones with the deadliest legends who run the campsite. There’s an easy overnight trail from here to Sweetwater Pool, the last stop on the 5-day Jatbula Trail, where you can swim in tiered waterfalls and mostly crocless rockpools.

2015

by Pip Jones & Ed Gorwell

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LFRF acknowledges all the Traditional Owners of the land [or country] and pay our respects to the Elders, past and present of all of The Northern Territory and urges you to please do the same.

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