MORIALTA Conservation Park
For more than 80 years, it's been a way of escaping into the bush - in a section of the foothills that's remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years.
Morialta Conservation Park starts at the picnic ground where Fourth Creek spills out of its gorge into Rostrevor and the suburbs. It's five hundred plus hectares spread north to meet Black Hill Conservation park and south to the Norton Summit Road.
There are a number of easy walks - good for young and old and some OK for strollers and wheelchairs - the most popular being the one that takes you one kilometre up the creek in a spectacular gorge to the parks best known attraction, the First Falls. The creek plunges over a thirty metre cliff into a natural pool to form a spectacular waterfall.
"Morialta" was the Kaurna aboriginal peoples name for the gorges, meaning "overflowing stream". These days with the advent of dams and bores in the hills, the falls unfortunately dry up mid-summer. But the Park always has something to offer visitors at any time of the year.
The Gorge walk meanders close to the bubbling creek and if you keep your eyes peeled, any number of the 74 bird species in the park could be on show. The friends of Morialta have co-ordinated a number of school groups to revegetate the valley floor after devastating washout floods in the 1980s and you can see there handy work when you visit the Park.
Morialta Conservation Park has been a popular picnic spot since 1913 after James Smith Reid donated several hundred acres to the people of SA above his grand Italianate Rostrevor Hall (now part of Rostrevor College). About 300,000 people each year enjoy the Park. Contact phone details are as follows, or you can email: info@postcards.sa.com.au
Morialta Conservation Park
ph: (08) 8281 4022 Fax (08) 8281 3080Friends of Black Hill and Morialta Inc.
Ph (08) 8336 5070Wirra Mai Tours
Ph: 0419 036 210
