Stevenson Falls

Stevenson Falls is a pretty waterfall nestled deep in the Colac Otway Region near the town of Barramunga.

When I last researched this waterfall, they were trying to rehabilitate the Gellibrand River basin by poisoning non-native species while replanting the area with native ones (almost similar to the Mainland Island concept they've got in

I'm not sure if this waterfall is permanent or seasonal, but one thing that seemed kind of uncharacteristic of waterfalls we had seen so far on our drought-ridden trip was that this one had a brownish color in its stream. In fact, the whole Gellibrand River seemed to be an opaque brown! That normally happens when the watercourse is flooding, and perhaps the strange crazy weather we had been experiencing might have swelled up the Gellibrand River such that this waterfall was performing quite well for us (but also muddying up the river by eroding the banks).

Directions: We reached Stevenson Falls from Apollo Bay so we'll describe how we got here.

From Apollo Bay, we drove 6km east on the Great Ocean Road before turning left onto Skenes Creek Rd. Eventually this joins into Forrest-Apollo Bay Rd, where we continued north until we reached the easy-to-miss turnoff for the falls on the left (I believe it's Roadknight Creek Road). This turnoff is about 25km north of the Great Ocean Road.

Once on Roadknight Creek Road, there's a road branching to the left in a little over a kilometre. Taking that branching road, we then had to go through a narrow (practically single-lane), curvy, unsealed mountain road towards a camping area. Once there, we had to make a choice of which way to get to the car park for the falls. It turned out that this choice wasn't entirely up to us.

The first route was considered to be a dry weather only route because it fords the Gellibrand River. Well, when we were there, the river looked rather deep and our rental car had no shot of making it across. Had we been able to ford the river, we would've been right at a car park requiring a real short (maybe less than 15-minute) walk to see Stevenson Falls.

So we took the alternate route, which went around the river towards the picnic area. It was from here that we took the longer walk to the falls (mentioned earlier in the description above).

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A much safer crossing of the Gellibrand River

Trail now hugging the brown Gellibrand River

Massive boulder before the Stevenson Falls

Another look at Stevenson Falls from the end of the trail

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TRIP REPORTS

• November 16, 2006

GUIDEBOOKS / OTHER RESOURCES

NEARBY WATERFALLS

• Triplet Falls
• Beauchamp Falls
• Hopetoun Falls
• Marriners Falls
• Carisbrook Falls

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