Eagle View Trail, roughly 10km, grade 4, allow three to four hours if you stop for lunch at the lookout. That's the one I'd do again tomorrow. Everything else in John Forrest National Park I'd rank somewhere below it, and a couple of them I'd rank well below it, which is really the point of this piece. I've now done every marked trail in the park at least twice, once in winter with the gaiters on because Jane Brook was running, and once in a dry October with two water bottles and no real need for either.
John Forrest is the closest proper bushwalking country to Perth, about a 25 minute drive out past the hills, and it gets treated by a lot of weekend visitors as a single destination rather than a park with half a dozen genuinely different walks in it. That's fair enough if you've got one morning. It's less fair if you're the sort of walker who wants to know which trail actually rewards the effort and which one is mostly carpark and Instagram. I've written a longer, trail-by-trail breakdown elsewhere — see John Forrest National Park walks: every trail ranked for the full list with times and turn-offs — but this is the short version, ranked, with my reasoning.
Eagle View Trail: the top of the list
Eagle View shares ground with the Bibbulmun Track for a stretch, which is as good a benchmark as I use for grading anything in the Perth Hills. If a day walk feels like a fair chunk of a Bibbulmun section, I rate it highly, and Eagle View earns that. The climb out of the valley isn't brutal but it's sustained, and the lookout near the top gives you the kind of view that's actually worth the knees complaining on the way back down. I did it in my usual merino socks and didn't need the gaiters that day, the ground was dry and well formed the whole way.
It's graded moderate to hard by the park signage and I'd agree with that rating, unlike some of the park's other