Out’n’About Sydney – Berowra Valley Regional Park

Sydney is such a great place for walkers, there are trails all over the city and they are of varying lengths and varying levels of fitness. I wonder how many walks you could go on before you would have to repeat a walk? I suspect it is in the hundreds. The reason I say this is because Sydney’s Street Directory has 272 maps and each one of them has at least one park, or forest, or green space of some kind. The picture below is one of the pages which contains the park we chose to walk in, but we could have picked any one of the other five parks and also had an excellent walk.

We went to the suburb of Hornsby Shire to access a walk in the Berowra Valley Regional Park. This park follows a deep valley carved out by the Berowra Creek and covers 4000 hectares. There were many trails in this park ranging from 2 or 3 km to 35 km, so really, there is a walk for everyone. We chose to walk on part of the Callicoma Walk.

I was impressed by the terrain. I felt like I was out in the forest as we walked along the river with lush bush and rock formations. We were in fact quite close on all sides by housing and busy streets.  We covered 5.82 km in 2:08 hours (can you tell I use an app to measure distance and time). We crossed the creek twice, once on a bridge and once, at a low point, on cement walking posts. We had to scramble up rocky sections in parts, or stairs, and other parts were quite flat. Sanford’s bush care background got the better of him at one spot and he stopped to pull some crofton weeds.  I felt by the time the walk was done that I had a good workout.

I decided to see what other facts I could learn about this park and was interested to read that on January 27, 2013, a man was found in the park after spending 9 weeks being lost. He survived one of Australia’s worst heat waves during which daytime temperatures reached more than 45 degrees, surviving on water and food he had brought with him. I wondered how much food this man carried with him when he went for walks and I’m pretty sure he was in another section of the park than where we were as we were always close to civilization.

Wonder which park we will go to next week?