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Mount Kosciuszko
Mainland Australia's highest summit in the Snowy Mountains
Mount Kosciuszko is the highest peak on the Australian mainland, a rounded, grassy summit reaching 2,228 metres in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. Gentle by the standards of the world's great peaks - a walking trail leads almost to the top - it is nonetheless the loftiest point on the flattest, driest inhabited continent, and as Australia's contribution to the Seven Summits it draws climbers completing that global circuit. Its slopes hold some of the only reliable snow in the country.
The mountain rises within the Australian Alps, an ancient, heavily eroded upland far older and lower than the young ranges of other continents, where billion-year-old rocks have been worn to smooth ridges. In winter the high country lies under snow, supporting Australia's small ski industry - in summer the alpine meadows bloom with wildflowers found nowhere else. Glacial features from past ice ages - cirques and tarns such as Blue Lake - dot the summit area, rare evidence of glaciation on the continent.
The Polish explorer Pawel Edmund Strzelecki named the peak in 1840 for the national hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko, seeing in its shape a resemblance to the patriot's tomb. The mountain and its surroundings are protected within Kosciuszko National Park, the largest in New South Wales, which safeguards the headwaters of the Murray and Snowy rivers and a fragile alpine ecosystem under pressure from warming and feral animals. A managed track carries large numbers of walkers to the summit each year.