What This Site Is
Walk About Adelaide is an independent walking guide to South Australia's trails. Every review is based on a real walk, recorded with GPS. Every elevation profile, every kilometre count, every segment colour on the interactive map comes from actual track data — not estimated distances or tourism-board approximations.
South Australia has some of Australia's finest long-distance and day-walk trail infrastructure. The Heysen Trail alone runs 1,200 km from Cape Jervis to Parachilna Gorge in the Flinders Ranges. The Fleurieu Peninsula has coastal routes that rival anything on the continent. The Adelaide Hills offer 713-metre summits less than 20 minutes from the CBD. Most of it is seriously underrated, and most of the information online is either stale, vague or SEO-padded fluff.
This site tries to be none of those things.
What You'll Find Here
Each walk review includes:
- Interactive map — Leaflet.js with coloured path segments showing surface type (single track, dirt road, paved, firetrack, beach)
- Live elevation profile — hover the chart and the corresponding point lights up on the map
- Accurate stats — distance, ascent, descent, max elevation and moving time from GPX data
- Free GPX download — full-resolution GPS track, no account required
- Honest difficulty rating — calibrated for fit but non-specialist walkers, not athletes
- Trail traffic indicator — how many other walkers you're likely to encounter
- Practical tips — water, permits, parking, seasonal conditions, hazards
Coverage Area
Currently focussed on South Australia's south — the Heysen Trail from Cape Jervis northward, the Fleurieu Peninsula's coastal and inland routes, the Adelaide Hills, and Cleland National Park. Coverage will expand as more walks get completed and documented.
All three current long-distance reviews cover the Heysen Trail, Australia's premier long-distance walking track. If you're planning a through-walk or cherry-picking sections, these reviews aim to give you enough ground-truth detail to make genuinely informed decisions about which sections to tackle and when.
The Technical Side
GPX files are recorded with a GPS watch during the actual walk. Track data is sampled and processed into the coordinate arrays used by the interactive maps. Elevation data comes directly from the GPX barometric altimeter — not SRTM interpolation — so it reflects actual surface conditions including any GPS drift on cloudy days.
The site is built with Jekyll, hosted as a static site, and designed to load fast on mobile. No tracking, no paywalls, no newsletter popups.
Accuracy and Corrections
Trail conditions change. Signs get replaced, tracks reroute, water sources dry up or appear. If something in a review is wrong or out of date, please use the contact details below — corrections are taken seriously and updated promptly.