About Tuross Falls
Tuross Falls surprised Julie and I with its resiliency considering that almost everything about our visit here suggested that the falls should have succumbed to the big drought that affected Southeastern Australia during our November 2006 visit. The reason why we were so pessimistic about the state of the falls was that the Snowy Mountains and its surroundings were so hard hit by the drought that all the foothills were totally brown with seemingly lots of fuel for bushfires. Even though we were technically still in Spring, it was a very discouraging sign. On top of that, we weren’t even sure that the trailhead was accessible by our low clearance 2wd rental car (see directions below for more details). Indeed, we took a gamble with our time and money by persisting with our visit to this waterfall. And as you can see in the photo at the top of this page, our gamble paid off.
Part of the reason why we might have been so fortunate to see the falls despite the dry conditions was that we had experienced a few consecutive days of rain when we were passing through the Illawarra Region and Southern Highlands prior to our visit to the falls. We learned from the friendly folks at the visitor center in the nearby town of Cooma that the same rain storm that affected our visit had also revived some of the drainages in Wadbilliga National Park (where Tuross Falls was located). They did express concern that the access road to get to the falls might be a little muddy from those rains, but at the same time, one of the employees said she would go there all the time and never needed a high clearance vehicle. So all that information gave me the confidence that it was at least worth a try to seek out the Tuross Falls.
Once Julie and I finally arrived at the trailhead, we obeyed the sign there and took the track leading us in the direction of the falls, which was said to be 2 hours return. The sign also indicated that there were other cascades about 30 minutes return going in the other direction, but we didn’t go to that one. In any case, after going over and besides some dry streambeds early on in the hike (not en encouraging sign), the trail was fairly straightforward to follow as we were generally going gently uphill in stretches flanked by lots of shrubs and mostly prickly trees (as if they were literally tinder bundles).
After nearly an hour of hiking, we then reached a short set of steps leading down to a lookout platform with a distant view of Tuross Falls (as you see pictured on this page). It turned out that the dry streambeds we had seen early on in the hike were not on the same stream as the waterfall. So this lookout platform was our turnaround point as we were pretty much relegated to just viewing the falls, but we weren’t able to experience more of the falls (i.e. getting closer to it) from what we could tell. When we returned to the car park, it turned out that the signs were almost spot on as we took just under 2 hours on this hike.
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Tuross Falls in better flow January 15, 2011 11:59 pm - I had visited the area in 2003 only to find the river was almost dry. Yesterday, 16 Jan 2011, there was plenty of water flowing through the cascades and over the falls. ...Read MoreNearest Waterfalls
