Blue Mountains Map and Distances

This is not one attraction at one address, which is why people get it wrong. It is seventy kilometres of villages along a single highway, with valleys several hundred metres deep underneath and only one place in the whole park where you pay anything. Understand the line and the rest follows. The Blue Mountains tours from Sydney all work the same corridor.

One highway, and everything hangs off it

The Great Western Highway runs west out of Sydney, climbs the escarpment at Glenbrook and follows the ridge all the way to Mount Victoria before dropping down the other side towards Lithgow. Every village sits on that line, and so does the railway, which is why the train and the road call at the same places in the same order.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service divides Blue Mountains National Park into six areas: Katoomba, Blackheath, Glenbrook, the Lower Grose Valley, Mount Wilson and the Southern Blue Mountains. A day tour from Sydney sees the first three, in that order, and nothing else.

The lower mountains — Glenbrook to Springwood

The first hour out of the city, several hundred metres lower than Katoomba and correspondingly warmer. Bureau of Meteorology figures for Springwood put January maximums near 29 degrees against Katoomba's 23.4, which is a bigger gap than most people expect within one range. This is where the coaches take their comfort stop, and where the e-bike ride into the Blue Labyrinth begins.

The mid mountains — Wentworth Falls and Leura

The middle band, where the escarpment starts to bite. Wentworth Falls has the 100-metre waterfall and the track down to it; Leura has the shops and the free hour. If a tour description mentions a waterfall walk, it almost certainly means Wentworth Falls, and if it mentions free time in a village, it almost certainly means Leura.

The upper mountains — Katoomba to Mount Victoria

The top of the range, and where the photographs come from. Katoomba at 1,017 metres holds Echo Point and Scenic World. Twenty minutes further north, Blackheath faces the Grose Valley from Govetts Leap. Beyond that the road runs out of towns and starts down the western side.

The valleys the road never enters

This is the part a map flattens. The Jamison Valley lies south of Katoomba, the Grose Valley north of Blackheath, and the Megalong Valley west between them. All three are several hundred metres below the road and none is crossed by it. That is why the Scenic Railway exists, why the walking tracks are all descents, and why two lookouts fifteen minutes apart can face completely different country.

Where you enter the park, and where the fee applies

There is no gate at Katoomba, Blackheath, Leura or Wentworth Falls. You drive in and park, and it costs nothing. The single exception is the Glenbrook area, where the National Parks and Wildlife Service charges $8 per vehicle per day and the entry station operates on weekends, public holidays and school holidays.

That is the whole fee structure of a million-hectare World Heritage property, and almost every third-party page gets it wrong in one direction or the other. Some invent an admission charge that does not exist; others tell you the park is free everywhere and let you find the Glenbrook entry station on a Saturday morning with no cash and no card.

If you are arriving by train or on a guided day, none of it applies to you at all. The fee is levied on vehicles, so a coach seat, a train ticket and a pair of boots all get you into exactly the same country for nothing.

Distances, journey times and the villages in order

Two tables do the work here. The first is how long it takes to get between the places you are choosing between; the second is the line itself, west to east, so you can see what sits where before you commit a day to one end of it.