A stunning introduction to the ecology of the Blue Mountains can be had at the Edge Maxvision Cinema , at 225-237 Great Western Highway (tel 02/4782 8928), a huge six-storey cinema screen created as a venue to show The Edge - The Movie (daily 10.30am, 11.20am, noon, 1.30pm, 2.25pm & 5.30pm; $12.50). The highlight of the forty-minute film is the segment about the "dinosaur trees", a stand of thirty-metre-high Wollemi Pine , previously known only from fossil material over sixty million years old. The trees - miraculously still existing - survive deep within a sheltered rainforest gully in the Wollemi National Park , north of Katoomba, and they made headlines when they were first discovered in 1994 by a group of canyoners. To film the pines, whose exact location is kept secret, it was necessary to work closely with the NPWS; there is an informative NPWS display in the cinema lobby.

A 25-minute walk south from the train station (or by Mountainlink bus from outside the Savoy Theatre) will bring you to Echo Point , the location of an information centre (daily 9am-5pm; tel 1300/653 408). From here you have breathtaking vistas that take in the Blue Mountains' most famous landmark, the Three Sisters (910m). These three gnarled rocky points take their name from an Aboriginal Dreamtime story which relates how the Katoomba people were losing a battle against the rival Nepean people: the Katoomba leader, fearing that his three beautiful daughters would be carried off by the enemy, turned them to stone, but was tragically killed before he could reverse his spell. They have stood here ever since, subjected to the indignities of thousands of tourist cameras and kept awake at night by spectacular floodlighting. The Three Sisters are at the top of the Giant Stairway , the beginning of the very steep stairs into the three-hundred-metre-deep Jamison Valley below, where there are several walking tracks to places with such intriguing names as Orphan Rock and Ruined Castle . There's a popular walking route, taking about two hours and graded medium, down the stairway and part way along the Federal Pass to the Landslide , and then on to the Scenic Railway and Sceniscender, either of which you can take back up to the ridge.

If you want to spare yourself the trek down into the Jamison Valley - or the walk back up - head for the tacky Scenic World complex at the end of Violet Street, where you can choose between two equally thrilling modes of transport. The Scenic Railway (daily 9am-5pm; every 10min; last train up leaves at 4.50pm; $5 one-way), originally built in the 1880s to carry coal, is a funicular that glides down an impossibly steep gorge to the valley floor. Even more vertiginous, but not as nail-bitingly thrilling, is Sceniscender (same price and hours), a new high-tech cable car (pram and wheelchair accessible) which took A$8 million to construct, opening in late 2000. With floor-to-ceiling windows, the views as the car drops 545m are really spectacular. At the base, there's a 330-metre elevated boardwalk through forest to the base of the Scenic Railway via the entrance to the old coal mine , where an audio-visual display tells the story of the mine at the time when the funicular railway still hauled coal.

Back up on the ridge, you can get your legs trembling again with Skyway (daily 9am-5pm; $8), a rickety-looking cable-car contraption that starts inside the Scenic World complex next to the Scenic Railway and travels 350m across to the other side of the gorge and back again - you can't actually get off - giving those who can bear to look a bird's-eye view of Orphan Rock, Katoomba Falls and the Jamison Valley. The Scenic World complex also features a new Scenic Cinema which shows a seventeen-minute film, Rapture in Blue ($3.30), of the mountain sights, designed to satisfy visitors who have missed the fabulous views on wet and misty days. There are more views at the complex's overpriced cafeteria-style revolving restaurant (9am-5pm daily), with a souvenir shop next door.