Scenic Skyway

The Scenic Skyway is a short ride with an outsized view. Its cabin hangs about 270 metres above the rainforest of the Jamison Valley and crosses 720 metres of open air between two clifftops at Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. When it opened in 1958 it was Australia's first cable car, and for most of the crossing there is nothing beneath the cabin but eucalypt canopy and the long sandstone walls that give these mountains their character.

What makes the ride worth taking is the angle it gives on the escarpment. On one side Katoomba Falls pours off the rim into the gorge; ahead and to the side stand Orphan Rock, a lone sandstone pillar cut off from the cliff, and further along the Three Sisters, the most photographed rocks in the range. The valley itself runs to the horizon in the blue haze that gives these mountains their name. The current cabin, launched in November 2017, has panels of switchable glass in the floor that turn clear partway across, so passengers can look straight down into the treetops.

The Skyway belongs to Scenic World, a family business started by Harry Hammon in 1945 around the old incline built for coal and oil-shale mining in the valley. The original Skyway cabin was retired in April 2004 after more than 587,000 crossings. Today the Skyway is one of three ways into the gorge on the site, alongside the Scenic Railway, which drops at a 52-degree incline and is billed as the steepest passenger railway in the world, and the Scenic Cableway, which descends to a boardwalk through the rainforest on the valley floor. Riding the Skyway first gives you the whole landscape before you go down into it.

Getting there

Scenic World is on the cliff edge at Katoomba, about 3 km from the town centre in the Blue Mountains. The nearest airport by distance is Bathurst Airport (BHS), about 70 km away, but most visitors arrive through Sydney: trains run from Sydney Central to Katoomba station in roughly two hours, and local bus 686 connects Echo Point with Scenic World. There is free parking on site.