Eight kilometres, moderate grade, about three hours including a stop at the falls — that's what I had scrawled in the notebook after doing the Eagle View link walk in John Forrest National Park last winter, wet-weather jacket on and gaiters left in the car because I'd misjudged the forecast. It's still the trail in this park that people get wrong on paper and right by accident, which tells you something about how the whole network here is rated versus how it actually walks.
I've now done every marked trail in John Forrest at least twice, in both boots and trail runners, in winter mud and in the dry crunch of a January afternoon, and I keep coming back to the same ranking. This isn't the biggest park in the state and nobody's claiming otherwise, but for a forty-minute drive from the city it punches above its size, and it's the one I send visitors to before they've decided whether they even like bushwalking.
The park DBCA looks after, and why it doesn't need dressing up
John Forrest sits in the Perth Hills, managed under the usual conservation reserve framework by the WA Dept. of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, and it was Western Australia's first gazetted national park, back in 1900. That vintage shows in the infrastructure — old picnic shelters, a disused railway formation, stonework from relief-labour projects during the Depression — and it means the trails were cut for people who wanted a Sunday outing, not a summit bid. Nothing in the park is technical. What varies enormously is how crowded, how exposed and how worth the climb each one actually is, and that's really the only ranking that matters.
National Park Falls Trail: the one everyone should do first
This is the trail on every brochure and every social feed, and for once the reputation mostly holds up. It's a loop of a little over three kilometres, easy to moderate grade, and it delivers Perth's most reliable waterfall photo opportunity for maybe eight weeks a year after decent winter rain — outside that window you're looking at a trickle over granite, and I'd rather people knew that before they drive out expecting Millbrook. I did it in a single 750ml bottle and didn't need a second, and the track surface is good enough that I wore my everyday trail shoes rather than anything heavier.
The payoff isn't really the falls themselves. It's the pool below them and the granite apron around it, where you can sit for twenty minutes and not see another soul on a weekday morning even though the car park was three-quarters full. Weekend afternoons are a different story and I wouldn't bother fighting the crowd for it then.
Eagle View Trail: the long grind, and where it borrows from the Bibbulmun
At roughly fifteen kilometres return, Eagle View is the trail that actually tests your legs, climbing out through jarrah and marri forest to a lookout that earns its name on a clear day. Sections of it link into the broader Bibbulmun Track Foundation network, and I use the Bibbulmun as my yardstick for grading everything else in this state, so I'll say it plainly: Eagle View sits around the same effort as a solid day on the Dwellingup section, climbs included, minus the overnight pack. If you've done that stretch and found it comfortable, Eagle View will feel like a warm-up, and if you haven't, this is a fair place to find out where your fitness actually sits before you commit to a multi-day Bibbulmun leg.
I carried two litres for this one plus a third in the car for after, wore the heavier boots rather than trail runners, and skipped the gaiters because the track's well-formed rather than scrubby. The wrong turn I made near the old railway dam cost me about twenty minutes and a fair bit of muttering, so watch the signage where the loop splits rather than trusting the worn path, which isn't always the marked one.
Rocky Pool and Jane Brook: the easy ones, and a rating I'd push back on
Rocky Pool Trail and the Jane Brook walk are both short, both shaded, both genuinely pleasant, and both listed as family-friendly on the park signage. I'd argue that rating is generous for Rocky Pool specifically. The approach to the pool itself crosses exposed granite that gets slick when damp, and I've watched more than one parent white-knuckle a toddler across it on a morning that looked perfectly dry from the car park. It's not dangerous if you're paying attention, but