Blue Mountains

PeaksNew South Wales,Australia

An Australian sandstone plateau west of Sydney, veiled blue by eucalypt oil, with three rock sisters at its lookout and a stairway into the valley.

September·Peaking now

Sep–Nov

Spring is when the bush itself flowers: crimson waratahs, the state's floral emblem, open through October into early summer, and the Fairfax track at Blackheath is the easiest place to find them. September is the driest month of the year, so the walking is good and the falls are thin. The Leura garden festival opens private gardens over the October long weekend.

Year-round The blue-hazed sandstone plateau, the Three Sisters and the cliff-edge lookouts are here year-round, and autumn and spring bring the mildest walking on the clifftop tracks.

The Blue Mountains take their name from a trick of light — the eucalypt forests below release a fine mist of oil and terpenes that scatters sunlight into a soft blue haze over the ranges. Despite the name, these are not peaks but a vast sandstone plateau about a hundred kilometres west of Sydney, split by sheer-walled canyons that rivers carved over millions of years. Ten thousand square kilometres of it are World Heritage, listed for 91 species of eucalypt — a near-complete record of how the tree evolved. On the ground that means two worlds a few hundred metres apart. Dry heath and wind on the clifftops; wet rainforest gullies at the bottom, where tree ferns close over the track. Its gorges still guard relics: in 1994 a ranger who abseiled into one of them found the Wollemi pine, a conifer known until then only from 90-million-year-old fossils and presumed extinct. Most visitors arrive at Echo Point above Katoomba, where three weathered sandstone towers — the Three Sisters, rising to 922 metres — stand over the Jamison Valley on the country of the Gundungurra and Darug peoples. From the clifftop lookouts, walking tracks drop past waterfalls onto a forest floor loud with parrots and sharp with the scent of eucalyptus. Alongside them the Scenic Railway, built in the 1880s to haul coal and shale, plunges down a 52-degree incline that still ranks as the world's steepest passenger railway. At dawn the valleys fill with mist, and at sunset the sandstone glows coppery. The 2019-20 fires burned close to three quarters of the World Heritage area, and the slopes still show it: blackened trunks furred green where the eucalypts shot new leaves out of their own bark. Today the plateau is laced with lookouts, hanging walkways and trails from short strolls to multi-day treks, most reached from the mountain towns of Katoomba, Leura and Blackheath.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Echo Point is the classic Three Sisters view, but it gets crowded — follow the clifftop path toward Katoomba Cascades for the same valley walls with an empty railing.
Cliff edges are mostly unfenced and mountain weather turns fast — keep to marked tracks, stay back from wet rock near the falls, and carry a warm layer even in summer.
Dusk wakes the forest — listen for the whip-crack call of whipbirds and the mimicry of lyrebirds on the lower tracks, and watch for black cockatoos crossing the gorges at last light.

Things to do

1
Descend the Giant Stairway
Step down the steep metal staircase that drops from Echo Point into the Jamison Valley, nearly a thousand steps clinging to the cliff beside the Three Sisters. At the bottom the track winds through cool rainforest gullies loud with birds beneath towering sandstone walls.
2
Plunge down the Scenic Railway
The carriage tips over the lip and drops through a tunnel cut in the cliff, steep enough that the glass roof shows nothing but rock sliding past. At the bottom you step straight out onto an elevated boardwalk that threads through rainforest past the old mine workings.
3
Be at Govetts Leap before the sun
Govetts Leap at Blackheath faces east over the Grose Valley, which is why it is the standard place to wait for first light. Get there thirty to forty-five minutes before sunrise: on cold, still mornings the valley below fills with cloud and the ridges stand out of it like islands. As the sun comes up the eucalypt haze that named these mountains turns the far ranges progressively bluer, then burns off.
4
Look over the Grose Valley
Stand at Govetts Leap near Blackheath and look out across the deep, forested Grose Valley, where waterfalls stream off the escarpment into wild bushland closed to roads. For a closer look, the nearby Grand Canyon track drops through fern-lined sandstone slots and past creeks.
5
Rope down waterfalls into a narrow sandstone slot
Join a guided canyoning trip into one of the narrow sandstone slots the region is famous for — abseiling down waterfalls, wading through cold dark pools and squeezing between fern-hung walls the sun barely reaches. The Blue Mountains are the birthplace of the sport in Australia.