Guthega to Charlotte Pass Walk (9km)

Australia's highest mainland country rises through Kosciuszko National Park, where weathered granite ranges, broad alpine plateaus and deep river valleys create the heart of the Snowy Mountains. Covering 673,542 hectares, it is the largest national park in New South Wales and part of the much larger Australian Alps reserve system that continues into Victoria and the ACT. This is the part of the continent where seasonal snow, treeless high plains and glacial landforms are not an anomaly but the character of the landscape itself, giving the park a setting unlike anywhere else in NSW.

The park holds the highest mountains in Australia, but its scale is just as important as its elevation. Beyond the well-known summit country, it includes extensive forests and woodlands, limestone cave areas, montane rivers and wetlands, and the headwaters of major inland catchments. The high country also plays an outsized role in eastern Australia's water systems, with snowmelt, bogs and fens helping regulate flows into river networks that extend far beyond the park boundary. In practical terms, that means many walks here sit within landscapes shaped as much by water and cold as by altitude.

Kosciuszko National Park is also a cultural landscape with a long and layered human history. It is on the Country of the Wiradjuri, Wolgalu, Ngunnawal and Monaro Ngarigo people, and the mountains were a traditional gathering place for trade, ceremony and seasonal travel, including gatherings associated with Bogong moth feasting across the Australian Alps. Aboriginal sites occur across the park, while the continuing connection between people and these mountains remains part of how the area is understood today.

European use left another visible layer, especially in the high plains and valleys where huts, stock routes and old grazing country still shape the character of parts of the park. Public concern over grazing damage helped drive early protection in the alpine area, beginning with a reserve around Mount Kosciuszko in 1906, before a much larger state park was created in 1944 and later became the national park. That mix of alpine ecology, water catchments, cultural history and enduring Snowy Mountains identity is what gives the region its unusual depth.