Two observations - first: those shots are badly blown out - overexposed. Second: the white balance got thrown off on those shots - poorly chosen Auto WB by the camera, but that also could have been influenced by the heavy flare from the sun and enhanced by the bad overexposure.
Now, this could have happened because of the metering mode you chose - how 'auto' were you? If you were in an Auto mode, or P mode with a wide or matrix metering mode chosen, then the camera meters based on the whole frame and can sometimes be led off track by a swath of dark or light area in the shot right where the metering system picked up the brightness of the scene - in your examples above of the good and bad shot, maybe the fact that the overexposed photo is framed more to the right, which included more of the dark red rock in the frame, caused the metering to set the exposure off that darker rock area and cause the second shot to be overexposed - the first was just a bit more to the right, with just a bit less of that rock in the frame, and that little amount could have made a difference.
The location of the sun in the shots can cause severe flare - in the first example you showed in the thread, there is clearly heavy flare from bright sky and what looks to be shooting into the sun. Bad flare can throw off the white balance pretty severely. Combine that with a metering system that tried to meter for the darker colored buildings in the scene rather than the sky above, and you get a severe overexposure.
There is one other possibility too - you may have a defective or failing lens. Aperture blades can sometimes get 'sticky' - where they don't fully close down before the shot is taken like they are supposed to. If your aperture blades are getting a bit sticky, this could be a cause for some shots every once in a while being overexposed. DSLR cameras meter a scene, and focus it, with the lens' aperture set wide open - even if you have an aperture of F8 set, the camera is initially viewing the scene with the aperture at the maximum value, say F3.5. So when you go to take the photo, the aperture quickly shuts down to F8 just before the shutter fires. If the aperture blades are occasionally sticking, what can happen is the camera has metered the scene for an aperture of F8, and set the shutter speed accordingly (say, 1/200). Then when you took the photo, the aperture didn't close down because it got stuck, and you ended up taking a photo at F3.5 and 1/200, which would be severely overexposed. Just to offer one other possibility - you can usually tell if your aperture blades are starting to stick by setting the aperture to a very small setting like F22 - then looking into the front of the lens, you should see the aperture blades opened fully before you shoot, and as you press the shutter, those aperture blades should immediately and quickly narrow down to a tiny hole in the middle of the blades. If you notice that they didn't seem to move smoothly, or after a few shots you noticed they didn't close down at all, you may have sticking blades.
The first scenario is still quite probable - that the metering system just overexposed a few shots because you were set to Auto or a wide metering mode and the composition of the scene changed, and along with shooting into the sun or with a bright sky, the overexposure caused bad flaring and threw off the white balance too.
