Location

Within  90 minutes of the cities and Queensland beaches,  you’ll encounter the Scenic Rim’s picture-postcard countryside.  Drive a little further and the patchwork of cropped-paddocks and grazing-land transitions to a seemingly undiscovered part of the world, with rich forests and clear-mountain streams.  Here, Nightfall nestles beside the cool clear rapids of Christmas Creek, not far from where the water flows cleanly from the ‘wilderness end’ of Lamington National Park.

The camp sits on top of a vast mystical ancient geology – the tendrils of lava flows from nearby Mt Warning. Much of the surrounding landscape is reminiscent of great tracts of south-east Queensland,  pre-colonisation, sheltering rare flora and fauna and some of the world’s largest remaining tracts of Gondwana sub-tropical rainforest and a magical rim of mountains, known locally as the Scenic Rim.

Right next door to Nightfall is world-heritage listed Lamington National Park.  This end of the park has no facilities or formed tracks,  but with a mud-map and some local knowledge you can easily explore a few of its hidden treasures,   including secluded groves of piccabeen palms, the majestic Larapinta Falls and Westray’s Grave.  Other attractions – including the expansive views to Byron Bay from Point Lookout,  the historic Stinson Wreck site and pockets of rare Antarctic Beech trees  – are  ideal challenges for experienced walkers, in the company of a local guide.

“We plunged through a green doorway, as sudden as from light into darkness and into the jungle itself where the trees rose in moss-covered columns,  some green, some grey, some mottled, some rough, others smooth, some twisted and distorted, others straight and stately,  all to support a continuing canopy of green … What a garden!” 

(Arthur Groom, One Mountain After Another)

Queensland explorer, naturalist and tourism pioneer Arthur Groom’s inspirational account of walking Lamington National Park and the area which surrounds Nightfall. His words perfectly capture the essence of the wild World-Heritage-listed Scenic Rim mountains we call home. Groom’s adventures, and the story of pioneer Bernard O’Reilly’s dramatic rescue of the survivors of a crashed Stinson Airliner, motivate many to visit our part of the world to experience first-hand the majesty and ruggedness of our our backyard, on the doorstep of Brisbane and the Gold Coast.