The Highest Place In Australia. Mount Kosciuszko, 2,228 meters, 7,310 feet, higher than Laramie, Wyoming, the most Wyoming of all places in Australia – at least, of all the places we visited. On Christmas Day we got snow here, and it was the talk of all Australia for the remainder of our time Down Under. This picture was taken near the summit.

 

We hiked some 25 kilometers in two days over crests of crumbling granite and meadows of lupines, gentians, buttercups, dandelions: terre verte dryness, windswept high plains, snow fences and violent blasts of wind, krumholtz and twisted, stunted trees, glacial catchments fed by murmuring brooks: the Main Range Track. Many familiar shapes and colors: but many strange ones too: ferns we didn’t recognize, snow gums sprouting green buds out of grey skeletons, tors of gneiss-like rock in odd misshapen knobs, great black crows whose voices by a trick of the wind resembled humans’. A strange hopping variety of ant. Bogong moths in multitudes retreating, like us, from the heat below.