Kakadu waterfall closures hit Top End dry-season trips

If Kakadu was circled on the winter calendar, the pitch has thinned out fast. Jim Jim and Twin Falls are staying shut through the 2026 season, taking two of the park’s best-known payoffs out of a run that already asks a lot in fuel, leave and planning. These are not little side tracks. They are the photos that get blokes pointing the bonnet north in the first place.

That is the useful part for anyone mapping a winter lap, not the Canberra park-management argy-bargy. If you’re towing a camper, loading the ute for a fortnight or trying to justify the haul from down south, Kakadu now looks more like a partial-access trip than the full bucket-list version people budget around. Distances are big up there and turning around is never cheap. Some visitors are already rethinking the route and heading west instead, while operators try to patch together a season that usually carries a serious chunk of the year’s trade.

The latest park update says 43 Kakadu sites are open and another 14 are being prepared, so this is not a locked gate across the whole park. Still, the missing names matter. Jim Jim and Twin Falls are the postcard stops, the ones that help sell the long drive north to first-timers and returning travellers. You can still make a Kakadu trip work without them, but the maths changes quickly if the big waterfall days were the reason you were going.

Part of the hold-up is plain access. A 20-kilometre stretch of Jim Jim Falls Road is due for gravel-standard upgrades, and that work has helped keep both falls off the board through the peak touring months. NT tourism minister Marie-Clare Boothby has called the outcome “not good enough”. Plenty of travellers staring at a steep fuel bill will land in roughly the same place.

What it means for a winter run

The sharper warning comes from the operators who rely on those stops being open. Tour owner Sean “Chizo” Chisholm said bookings were down 70 per cent after the closures were confirmed, and he compared the hit to the trade shock of COVID.

“It’s going to be a very hard season, it’s like COVID hit all over again.”

— Sean “Chizo” Chisholm, Never Never Safari Tours

Tourism Top End general manager Samantha Bennett said the sector was “absolutely in repair mode”. That about sums it up. Businesses can still sell Kakadu, and the park still has plenty open, but they are now selling around the holes rather than around the headliners. For most winter travellers, this is not a random national park stop. It is a version of Kakadu built around a couple of famous waterfall days, so expectations need a hard reset before the roads dry out.

If Kakadu is still on your list this winter, treat it as a trimmed-back trip and budget that way. Check what is confirmed open, assume the hero waterfalls are out, then decide whether the remaining stops justify the detour, campsite spend and diesel. Parks Australia says the Kakadu Access Report is updated daily, so check it before you burn the fuel. If Jim Jim and Twin Falls were the whole reason for the run, this might be the year to wait, or to join the travellers already looking west for better value. Brutal, yes, but better than finding out after the leave is booked and the diesel bill is already real.