The Three Sisters, Blue Mountains: Echo Point, the legend and the walk down

The Three Sisters are what is left of a sandstone cliff after a few million years of wind and water. The plateau is soft rock over hard, so the valleys cut deep and the cliffs stay sheer, and where a spur of the escarpment has been worn through from both sides the columns that remain stand alone. Meehni is the tallest at about 922 metres above sea level; Wimlah and Gunnedoo follow, each a little lower.

Below them the Jamison Valley drops some 600 metres to a floor of rainforest and eucalyptus, and across it Mount Solitary sits on the skyline with nothing built between. The haze that colours the whole view is oil from the eucalyptus leaves, scattering the light, and it is the reason the range is called blue. The same view was inscribed as part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in 2000.

You cannot climb the Sisters themselves; the bridge to the first pillar, Honeymoon Bridge, is the closest anybody gets, and it is reached by the Giant Stairway from the lookout.

The story told at the lookout is of three sisters of the Katoomba people who fell in love with three brothers of a neighbouring nation, when marriage between them was forbidden. The brothers came to take the sisters by force; a witch doctor turned the three women to stone to protect them, meaning to reverse the spell when the fight was over, and was killed before he could. The sisters have stood on the cliff since.

That is the version guides tell, and it is a good story. The Gundungurra and Darug people, on whose country Katoomba sits, hold their own accounts of the place, and the Aboriginal cultural centre beside the lookout is where to hear them. Several small-group days build in time for it.

Echo Point is a broad paved lookout on the cliff edge at the end of Katoomba’s main road, with the Sisters a few hundred metres to the left and the whole valley in front. There is a visitor centre, a café, the cultural centre and a car park sized for coaches, which is why every Blue Mountains tour from Sydney can stop there and why it is busy from eleven to two.

The coach days give you about forty minutes: the main platform, the photograph, the shop. The small-group days walk along the cliff top to Lady Darley’s or Spooners lookout, where the same view has a tenth of the people, or start down the Giant Stairway. $211 arrives towards dusk, when the crowds have gone and the rock is orange.

A second lookout, Eagle Hawk, sits a short walk east and sees the Sisters side-on. Most tours have time for it if you ask.

From Echo Point a track leads to the top of the Giant Stairway: roughly 900 steps cut into the cliff and bolted to it, dropping to the valley floor beside the Sisters with Honeymoon Bridge a few minutes down. At the bottom a track runs through the rainforest to the base of the Scenic Railway, so the neat loop is stairs down, Walkway along, Railway or Cableway up.

The whole loop is about two hours at an easy pace, and it is the best walk in the Blue Mountains that fits inside a day trip. The coach days do not have the time for it. The small-group days sometimes do part of it; $211 and the private days can build it in if you ask when you book.

Take the stairs down, never up: the Railway does the climb for you, and your knees will thank you on the coach.

Every tour stops here. Echo Point is on all twelve listings, from $142; what differs is how long you get and at what hour.

Late afternoon is the light. The rock turns orange with the sun behind you; the dusk listings are built around it.

The Giant Stairway is the walk. About 900 steps down to the valley, along the Walkway and up by Railway, two hours, on the days that allow it.

Echo Point sits at the end of Katoomba Street, and the town runs a kilometre uphill behind it: cafés, a small art deco cinema, secondhand bookshops and the Carrington Hotel at the top, which has been serving mountain visitors since 1883. Tours that give free time for lunch put you here or in Leura, the next town east, whose main street of gardens and tea rooms is the prettier of the two.

Between the lookout and Scenic World the Prince Henry Cliff Walk runs along the escarpment edge for about three kilometres, passing Katoomba Falls and half a dozen lookouts. Tours drive it in five minutes; the small-group days sometimes walk a section of it, and it is the best free half hour on the plateau.

The other name to know is Lincoln’s Rock, a flat sandstone ledge at Wentworth Falls ten minutes east, with the same valley and almost nobody on it. It is where the small-group and private days go when the coaches are at Echo Point, and it is the photograph people mistake for the Sisters.