Viewing Platforms 3 and 4

Platforms 3 and 4 are where most photographers position themselves for the late afternoon light, which hits the ridgelines between roughly 4 and 6 in the evening and saturates the colours to their fullest extent. The formations here are a dense succession of ridges and valleys in bands of deep red, amber, rust, and cream, with occasional green and grey layers adding to the disorder. From the elevated walkways, the landscape looks convincingly painted.

The shuttle bus drops you at each platform in sequence. Platform 3 offers a wider panorama; Platform 4 gets closer to the rock formations and shows more texture and detail. Both are worth the stop. The walkways keep you on elevated boardwalks — the formations themselves are roped off and cannot be entered.

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A story
The colours that look artificial from a distance are entirely natural, produced by iron oxides, chlorite, and gypsum precipitating in different layers under different geochemical conditions over millions of years. The red and orange hues come from oxidised iron; the green from chlorite; the white from gypsum. Water and wind then carved the current formations over the past ten million years, cutting through the sedimentary layers like a blade through a layered cake — except the layers run to hundreds of metres in depth.