What to See in Kosciuszko National Park - Top Sights and Attractions

Town in Australia. Kiandra is an abandoned gold mining town and the birthplace of Australian skiing. The town is situated in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, in the Snowy Monaro Regional Council inside the Kosciuszko National Park. Its name is a corruption of Aboriginal 'Gianderra' for 'sharp stones for knives'. It was earlier called Gibson's Plains, named after Dr. Gibson, a settler in the district in 1839. For a century, Kiandra was Australia's highest town.

Kiandra lies approximately 90 kilometres (56 mi) north-west of Cooma on the Snowy Mountains Highway between Adaminaby and Talbingo. It sits at 1,400 metres (4,600 ft) above sea level and is situated on a high, treeless ridge on the banks of the Eucumbene River, which is snow-covered during winter and is subject to high winds. It lies in the Australian Alps montane grasslands bioregion according to Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia.

After decades of decline, restoration work on the remaining buildings at Kiandra took place from 2009 to 2020, including work on the historic Kiandra Courthouse Chalet and Wolgal Lodge fishing cottage being conducted by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and volunteers, enabling occasional amenities and limited accommodation at Kiandra.

The remaining buildings in the town were either destroyed or severely damaged during the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season.^[3]

Mount in Australia. Mount Townsend, a mountain in the Main Range of the Great Dividing Range, is located in the Snowy Mountains region of New South Wales, Australia.

With an elevation of 2,209 metres (7,247 ft) above sea level, Mount Townsend is the second-highest peak of mainland Australia. Located in Kosciuszko National Park, the mountain is 3.68 kilometres (2.29 mi) north of Australia's highest mainland peak, Mount Kosciuszko.

Although lower than Mount Kosciuszko, Mount Townsend has a more craggy peak and is arguably more dominant than the relatively round-topped Mount Kosciuszko.

The confusion about swapping the names of Mount Kosciuszko and Mount Townsend was straightened out in 1940 by B. T. Dowd, a cartographer and historian of the NSW Lands Department. His study reaffirmed that the mountain named by Strzelecki as Mount Kosciuszko was indeed, as the NSW maps had always shown, Australia's highest summit. When Macarthur's field book of the historical journey was published in 1941 by C. Daley it further confirmed Dowd's clarification. This means that Targangil, mentioned in Spencer's 1885 article, was the indigenous name of Mount Townsend, not of Mount Kosciuszko.

Mount Townsend has a prominence of only 189m which is relatively low compared to other mountains worldwide. In the more stricter prominence cut off points, the most common of which being the 300m prominence rule, Townsend would not be classified as its own mountain, and instead a subsidiary peak. Due to Australia's much flatter topography than all other continents a prominence cut off point of 300m is almost never used instead opting for less strict definitions of 50m or 100m when classifying peaks. If using the 300m rule this makes Mount Bogong in Victoria the second highest mountain.

Mount Townsend is the second highest mountain in Australia.^[5]

Cave in Australia. The Yarrangobilly Caves are located in a 12-kilometre-long karst region along the Yarrangobilly River valley in the north of Kosciuszko National Park, New South Wales, Australia. Discovered to British colonists by a cattleman, the Yarrangobilly Caves system includes several independent limestone caves formed over different time periods, from several million to a few hundred thousand years old. The older examples are in higher strata and have more speleothem decoration.

The caves are administered by the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Three lit show caves are regularly open to visitors, two for guided tours and the third for a self-guided tour. The caves complex also includes a 20-metre-long (66 ft) and up to 2.5-metre-deep (8 ft) 27 °C (81 °F) thermal pool, fed by natural warm-water springs, and a number of walking tracks.^[9]

Cordillera in Australia. The Great Dividing Range, also known as the East Australian Cordillera or the Eastern Highlands, is a cordillera system in eastern Australia consisting of an expansive collection of mountain ranges, plateaus and rolling hills, that runs roughly parallel to the east coast of Australia and forms the fifth-longest land-based mountain chain in the world, and the longest entirely within a single country. It is mainland Australia's most substantial topographic feature and serves as the definitive watershed for the river systems in eastern Australia, hence the name.

The Great Dividing Range stretches more than 3,500 kilometres (2,175 mi) from Dauan Island in the Torres Strait off the northern tip of Cape York Peninsula, running the entire length of the eastern coastline through Queensland and New South Wales, then turning west across Victoria before finally fading into the Wimmera plains as rolling hills west of the Grampians region. The width of the Range varies from about 160 km (100 mi) to over 300 km (190 mi). The Greater Blue Mountains Area, Gondwana Rainforests and Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Areas are located in the Range. The highest place in Australia, the 2,228 m (7,310 ft) Mount Kosciuszko, resides in the Snowy Mountains portion of southern Great Dividing Range.^[10]