Blue Mountains, Sydney

The foothills of the Blue Mountains begin about an hour west of Sydney. Dave, Mike and I took a day trip up there. Katoomba, a town with an overlook that was swarming with tourists, was about two hours from Sydney. The Blue Mountains are a high plateau with gorges that were created by water runoff. The guidebook says they are some of the only mountains in the world that you look (and hike) down into. The first three photos were taken at the Katoomba overlook by three rocks called the Three Sisters.

We drove along the edge of the canyon to Leura, a town adjacent to Katoomba, and had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the gorge.

The next photo was taken from the restaurant. In the foreground is a eucalyptus tree blooming with white flowers. We were there about a month ago, which of course is spring in the southern hemisphere. Some of the eucalyptus trees were blooming with white flowers, some had new growth that's red, some had light green new growth. We also noticed differences in the color of the bark with different species. The Blue Mountains have over 100 different species of eucalyptus trees, and the blue haze that give the moutains their name comes from the oil that is released by the trees. (A note added about an hour later: I finished this post and then went into the kitchen. The hill across the valley from us, visible from our kitchen window, has a clump of eucalyptus trees that are blushed with reddish new growth right now. Spring is probably a month later here than in Sydney. I had never noticed the reddish new growth on those trees. Three weeks of looking so closely at eucaltypus trees around Sydney and on Tasmania has given me a better sense of the variety of colors and shapes I might see in them.)

Dave and Mike hiked down along the canyon from the restaurant in Leura back to the lookout in Katoomba. The next three photos were taken on their walk.