The Blue Mountains are not mountains. They are a sandstone plateau west of Sydney, cut into deep valleys of eucalypt forest, and the blue that named them comes off the trees. Droplets of eucalypt oil in the air scatter the light, so the far ridges sit in a haze that deepens the further you look. The standard place to see it is Echo Point above Katoomba. The Jamison Valley starts at the fence, and three sandstone pillars stand at the cliff edge. The Three Sisters come with a story about girls turned to stone, sold at the lookout as ancient lore; a Katoomba local made it up in the 1920s. The ground is genuinely old country to the Gundungurra and Darug people, and that is the part the story buries. Beside the pillars the Giant Stairway drops off the rim, close to a thousand metal steps that take you down the cliff. At the bottom the track runs through rainforest gullies loud with birds under walls of sandstone.
The other way down is a railway. Its carriage tips over the lip and falls through a tunnel cut in the rock, steep enough that the glass roof shows you nothing but stone sliding past. It sets you down on a boardwalk through rainforest, past old mine workings. Along the escarpment at Blackheath, Govetts Leap faces east over the Grose Valley. People stand there forty minutes before sunrise; on cold still mornings the valley fills with cloud and the ridges come out of it like islands, and as the light arrives the far ranges turn bluer and bluer before the haze burns off. Below the rim, guided parties abseil down waterfalls into the narrow sandstone slots that made this the birthplace of canyoning in Australia, wading dark pools between fern-hung walls the sun never reaches. And somewhere down one of these gorges, in a place the authorities will not name, fewer than a hundred wild Wollemi pines still grow. The tree outlived the dinosaurs. When the 2019 fires came up the valleys, crews went in to shield it without saying where.