Heysen Trail Itinerary and Resupply Plan

Planning for a long walk can be very intimidating. It’s difficult to know where to start with your itinerary and food resupply plan, especially over the course of a 1200 km long trail. However, having a rough Heysen Trail itinerary established before you head off will help you immensely out on the trail, even if you don’t stick to it.

As Australia’s longest walking track, it’s a big adventure. After 55 days, I completed a southbound thru hike of the trail in South Australia earlier this year. Now, I want to help others who are interested in doing the same. I have a complete guide to thru hiking the trail, which has all the information you’ll need, plus an extensive packing list. But this blog post is focused on my specific Heysen Trail itinerary and resupply plan.

If you want to begin planning your thru hike or section hike of the Heysen, I hope this helps you develop a good itinerary and plan for your walk.

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Planning Your Heysen Trail Itinerary

Planning an itinerary for the Heysen Trail is an important part of preparing for the trail. While you certainly might not stick to it for the entire way, it’s still helpful to have a good idea of where you’ll be as you continue your journey. Having an itinerary can help you work out roughly your daily distances and town stops, which will then inform your resupply options as well.

It can be really difficult to know how far you’ll want to walk each day and when or if you’ll take any rest days. However, sitting down with the maps and reading other people’s itineraries, will help you get to know the trail, the campsites and the towns that you’ll be coming into along the way. I recommend getting the paper maps from the Friends of the Heysen as this will visualise the trail and camps for you and assist in formulating a rough plan.

Below, I’ve put together some tips and personal experiences from the trail that might help you figure out your own itinerary. I’ve also outlined my full detailed itinerary below, which is what I actually ended up doing, including the location of my resupply boxes I had on the way and daily distances covered.

My Heysen Trail Itinerary

When I sat down to write up my own itinerary, I didn’t really know where to start. I found it difficult to know how long I would want to walk each day, but soon put something together that I thought might be the most realistic plan for me. It turns out, I did pretty well, because I actually stuck to my itinerary for most of the trail.

The location of the campsites sometimes dictates your itinerary. Some sections give you very little option other than to walk from one campsite to the next. For example, from Wilpena Pound to Red Range the distance is almost 30km with no official camp in between. This means that most hikers have to do the full 30km in one day.

On the other hand, some campsites are much closer together and this means you can either have shorter days or skip along to the next one. I did this sometimes, for example, on day 11 I skipped Eyre Depot Campsite and went straight from Mt Arden South to Dutchman’s Hut to make it 29km for the day. But obviously, this all depends on how slow you want to take it and how you’re feeling on the trail.

Here are some other considerations I had while planning my Heysen Trail itinerary:

Why I Walked Southbound

First, you need to work out which direction to walk in: northbound (NOBO) or southbound (SOBO). I decided to go SOBO for a number of reasons.

I’d always thought that walking from the Flinders Ranges down to the coast would be the way I’d prefer to go. There’s something about walking towards the coast and finishing at the very tip of a peninsula that feels more conclusive than just finishing in the middle of Parachilna Gorge in the Flinders.

Plus, I also thought tackling the harder sections at the beginning would be ideal on fresh legs. While there are certainly difficult days further south, I found that once I’d got through the Flinders Ranges, I was more mentally and physically prepared for whatever was to come.

Either way it’s a personal choice and will depend on logistics, weather/timing and personal preference.

Campsites on the Heysen Trail

I tended to stick to the official Heysen Trail campsites. This made planning my itinerary much easier, plus I also preferred to be somewhere with a water tank each night so I didn’t have to carry excess water.

Like I said above, some campsites are nicely spread out along the trail at good intervals, while others might be far apart or too close together. This will dictate a bit of your itinerary and might force you to walk more or less than you’d prefer.

There are also some sections which don’t have official campsites and you’ll have to use either hotels, caravan parks, B&Bs or public campgrounds. This is more common in the southern half of the trail, especially through the Adelaide Hills. However, there are enough options along the way that I was never stuck for a spot to sleep or camp, which is nice to know when planning your itinerary.

Navigation for long distance trails: I recommend the FarOut App for any long distance hiking trail, including the Heysen Trail, Bibbulmun Track, Australians Alps Walking Track and more!

Choosing Accommodation on the Trail

While you could do most of the trail by just camping, it is nice to be able to stay in accommodation in the towns to give you a break. I mostly opted for caravan parks, because this gave me the choice of either staying in my tent on an unpowered site if the weather was good or going for a cabin if I wanted to splurge during bad weather. Although, I was pretty lucky that I was able to share my accommodation with other hikers, which lowered the cost of cabins and rooms.

There are also a few B&Bs and hotels that have become quite well-known along the Heysen Trail and are certainly must stays. These include, Elizabeth House in Quorn, Spalding Hotel and Heysens Rest B&B in Myponga. I would say a majority of hikers stay at these three places when passing through and it’s not hard to figure out why – they are certainly the best accommodation on trail.

Choosing accommodation also helped with my resupply plan. Staying at either a caravan park or B&B meant that I was able to either have a food box dropped there or rely on the supermarket or general store in town.

All the accommodation places I stayed at on the trail are as follow (prices I paid are listed in the itinerary at the bottom):

Wilpena Pound Caravan Park (unpowered camping site)
Hawker Caravan Park (unpowered camping site)
Elizabeth House, Quorn (single bed in dorm room)
Beautiful Valley Caravan Park, Wilmington (shared cabin)
Melrose Caravan Park (unpowered camping site)
Crystal Brook Caravan Park (shared cabin)
Spalding Pub (shared twin room)
Burra Caravan Park (unpowered camping site)
Kapunda Caravan Park (unpowered camping site)
Sir John Franklin Hotel, Kapunda (private double room)
Mount Compass Caravan Park (shared cabin)
Heysens Rest B&B, Myponga (private single room)

Food Resupply Planning

I decided to plan my own food resupply boxes or food drops along the trail. This was mostly because I have dietary requirements (gluten and dairy free) and I didn’t think that most towns on the way would have enough options for me to do a full resupply.

I decided to use my itinerary and planned town stops to work out how many boxes I could drop. I decided on 9 food boxes in total, at frequent intervals across the trail.

These were dropped at either caravan parks or other accommodation that I planned on staying in along the way. I called all 9 businesses before I set off to ensure it was okay to leave a box with them. While posting boxes ahead is an option, I ended up driving the boxes up along the trail and dropping them into reception myself.

The accommodation providers kindly never charged me for the service and were very obliging as long as I committed to staying one night when I arrived – which is fair.

My food boxes were left at the following locations:

Hawker Caravan Park
Elizabeth House, Quorn
Melrose Caravan Park
Crystal Brook Caravan Park
Spalding Hotel
Burra Caravan Park
Kapunda Caravan Park
Woodhouse Activity Centre, near Bridgewater
Heysens Rest, Myponga

Read next: How to Plan Your Food for Hiking

Food resupply box in Burra — Sorting food in Myponga

Rest Days

I decided not to plan my rest days and to just see what happened when I was out there. I think this was a good way to go, because it allowed me to just take rest days when I felt I needed them. I ended up having four rest days across the whole trail, including in Quorn, Crystal Brook, Burra, and Kapunda.

While a few hikers didn’t have any rest days and tried to do some shorter days to allow for rest, I really enjoyed my four zero days. It gave me more time to sleep, do laundry, shopping, speak with family and friends and EAT!

Find my detailed itinerary below! Scroll across for more info in the table.