Great Sky Island is the tutorial area of the game, where you’ll regain some of your lost powers and spend a great deal of time demonstrating your competence with them before you’re finally able to descend to Hyrule Kingdom. While you may be glad to put !Great Sky Island behind you, your adventures in the sky aren’t over after this, as !Great Sky Island is just one of many celestial bodies you can explore, something which will become apparent after you activate the Lookout Landing Skyview Tower. At some point you’re going to want to explore some of these other gravity-defying islands, which begs the question… how do you reach sky islands in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?
(1 of 2) Launching yourself up towers and gliding to unexplored sky islands is one way to go about reaching new sky islands.
Launching yourself up towers and gliding to unexplored sky islands is one way to go about reaching new sky islands. (left), If you see an ensorcelled sky rock make landfall, you can use Recall on it to ride it back up into the sky. (right)
How to Reach Sky Islands in Tears of the Kingdom¶
There’s one obvious way to get back into the sky - just fast travel to one of the various fast travel points on !Great Sky Island. This won’t get you anywhere new, but you may be able to spot unexplored areas off in the distance, or even get another shot at some of the disconnected sub-islands that are in the vicinity of !Great Sky Island. You should probably wait until you unlock the Paraglider before bothering with any aerial exploration, however, as it’s both an essential means of traversal and a safety net in case something goes awry.
Generally speaking, however, if you want to reach elevated areas in the sky your options are somewhat limited.
Another fairly obvious way to reach these lofty islands is by launching yourself with Skyview Towers. They propel you far higher into the air than the elevation at which most of these islands hover, and in some cases, you may even find yourself close enough to use the 
Paraglider to glide over to some of these sky islands after launching with a Skyview Tower. This may be fairly dependant on your Stamina, however, and upgrading your Stamina will increase the distance you can glide, potentially giving you access to new areas.
Finally, and perhaps least reliably, there are ensorcelled sky rocks. You’ll see these stones floating down out of the sky from time to time, coming to rest on the ground. At a glance, they may seem like little more than curiosities, but if you quickly climb on one after it lands and use your 
Recall ability on it, you can rewind its trajectory and ride it back up into the sky. These sky rocks lead to all sorts of places, and often put you near sky islands. As usual, using your Paraglider may be necessary to seal the deal, and while the locations of skyrocks seem fairly fixed (inasmuch as if you see one fall at a certain location, you’ll likely see it fall there again if you leave and return later), it’s possible to temporarily “miss” one by simply waiting too long to mount it. Recall only rewinds so far, after all, and if you don’t rewind the sky rock fast enough, you may not be able to rewind it back to the height you need - or even get it off the ground at all!
You can sometimes find puzzle elements on easy to reach sky islands, which you can then use to reach other sky islands.
Sky Islands can house all sorts of treasures and points of interest, including new Shrines and new Device Dispensers which may yield new Zonai Devices. These new sky islands are also often protected by more powerful Zonai !Constructs, however, so be wary when exploring them.
It should also go without saying that this page covers how to get back up to sky islands, but moving from one sky island to another can be another matter entirely. If you can reach a sky island by one of the means listed above, you’d do well to search around for puzzle elements, and be mindful to carry Zonai capsules with you - if you find a floating platform hovering off the edge of an island, you may just be one Zonai Fan away from being able to cross over to an adjacent island. Just be wary, most puzzle elements have a finite lifespan and will vanish eventually, especially if you get too clever and try to ride them too far out. You cannot, unfortunately, create a grand skybarge to carry you from island to island, you’re at best limited to ferrying yourself from one island to another nearby island.
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