Laura stands here on the edge of a cliff. See how close her feet are to the drop-off?

Where she’s perched is a bad, bad place. Here’s a view of the same cliff from another perspective.

You won’t see me anywhere near where Laura was standing. I get vertigo. Edges scare me. Tourist guides advise timorous hikers that in certain places around here, they’ll want to scoot along the trail on their butts.

In high school I was a rock climber. At the time, I made a great effort to overcome my fear of heights. Even though I eventually became good at scaling rock faces, fear lurked in the back of my mind.

It’s been decades since I’ve been on belay. Over that time I lost the capacity for tolerating great heights, and today I am as fearful of them as I ever was.

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We’re walking along the lip of King’s Canyon in Watarrka National Park, a place full of interesting features to examine. These trees are varieties of eucalypts, a genus endemic to Australia. I’m guessing they are either ghost gums or white gums.

I’m struck by the many different forms eucalypts take. They comprise some seven hundred species, and only a handful grow naturally outside of Australia. To me, they are exotic and beautiful.

This sandstone has tales to tell. The layers were deposited at different angles, a phenomenon called cross-bedding, which occurs in rocks that started out as sand dunes. As winds shift directions, the sand they carry piles up on one face or another of the dunes, creating layers that tilt. The tilted layers become visible when the rock so formed erodes.

A couple of kilometers away, rocks formed from the same sand carry marks from water. These were deposited in a shallow sea or estuary. Ripples impressed by water on the sand have been captured in stone.

Watarrka National Park management built rugged wooden stairways to provide routes to otherwise inaccessible places in King’s Canyon.

One such place is called the Garden of Eden, a spring-fed pond surrounded by ferns, cycads and abundant wildlife.

Water attracts types of desert-dwelling birds that I haven’t seen before. Their coloring is attractive. Walking on a new continent, I’ve encountered so many new plants and animals. I can now appreciate the thrill Charles Darwin must have felt each time he disembarked from the Beagle into a new ecosystem.

The scale of the canyon walls is hard to capture in photographs. I took this one to try to convey some idea of the dimensions of the place. If you look closely along the upper lip, you can just make out two human figures.

Even in this telephoto shot, cliff heights are impressive. Just watching that guy sit right on the edge gave me stomach butterflies.

Australia’s Red Center has features rivaling those in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. The Australian formations may not be as well known, but they’re every bit as scenic. Moreover, they’re blessedly free of crowds.