Blue Mountains - Giant Stairway and the Three Sisters

A few days after the Kiana trip I flew down to Sydney and spent a few days in the city. Then I took a train to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains.
The Blue Mountains get their name from the blue haze often seen in the valleys. I believe it is due to the eucalyptus trees. Katoomba turns out to be a great spot for sightseeing, with lots of spectacular scenery within walking distance.
On my first day I walked out to the cliffs at Echo Point. Here is a formation called the Three Sisters, basically three very large rock formations extending from the cliffs. Right beside them is the "giant stairway", about 900 steps cut into the sandstone and leading down to the valley floor. Total vertical distance this stairway covers is about 300 meters. It basically just zigzags down along the cliff face, essentially a vertical descent. Guardrails are installed or it would be insane to try and go down. I climbed down and back up, at which point I was pretty out of breath...
Over the next few days I did some more hikes along the cliffs, down along the Katoomba waterfalls, down the stairway again and across to the falls and back up, and so on. Can't handle much more than 7-8 km a day, but that's not too bad considering how much of it is up and down steps. Other than that I've just been working and reading...

It is interesting how most people take this experience in. When I got out to the Three Sisters, a lot of people where on the viewing platform by the tourist center, all taking pictures and walking maybe 50 or a 100 meters down one of the paths. Beyond this, the population thinned out to maybe 1/50th - so at most one out of every 50 people went further than a 100 meters from where they got of the bus. Going down the giant stairway, I saw one other person... It really shows how for most people this is a consumer experience. They pay, get taken to places like this by bus, spend maybe an hour milling about and taking each others pictures, and then leave again. I think they spend more time telling their friends back home about the trip than they actually spend here. I'll have been here at least a week before I leave, and barely feel like I know the area at all or have really experienced it.

Pictures: In the picture of the Three Sisters, note the walkway and tiny black mark of a person on the far left, for scale.

The picture of the stairway naturally only shows a tiny piece, but it was all like this. Metal steps where the sandstone ones had fallen down. In most places the handrail is followed by a vertical drop, down, down, down...

The third picture shows one of the rock overhangs on a path around the waterfalls. Lots of places like this.