What are the Snowy Mountains?

The Snowy Mountains are a mountain range in southern New South Wales, part of the Australian Alps section of the Great Dividing Range. They contain the highest peaks on mainland Australia, including Mount Kosciuszko at 2,228 metres, and are the only part of mainland Australia where significant snow falls reliably each winter.

The range covers the upper catchments of the Snowy River and Murrumbidgee River, both rising in the high country and flowing in opposite directions: the Snowy east toward the Pacific Ocean and the Murrumbidgee west into the Murray-Darling Basin. The Australian Alps spread across south-eastern New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, and north-eastern Victoria, with the highest sub-range being the Main Range in Kosciuszko National Park.

The Snowys host Australia's main ski resorts, including Thredbo, Perisher Valley, Charlotte Pass, and Mount Selwyn. The ski season usually runs from the long weekend in early June (the Queen's Birthday or King's Birthday holiday) through to early October, with snow cover increasingly variable in warmer recent decades. Summer brings hiking, fishing, and mountain biking, and Mount Kosciuszko itself is one of the most accessible of the Seven Summits to climb.

The Snowy Mountains are also famous for the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, built between 1949 and 1974. The scheme uses 16 dams, 145 kilometres of tunnels, and seven power stations to capture the Snowy River and divert much of its water westward through the mountains for irrigation and power generation. About 100,000 people from more than 30 nations worked on the scheme, two-thirds of them post-war European migrants, making it a foundational story of multicultural Australia. The Snowy 2.0 expansion, currently under construction, will more than double the scheme's pumped hydro storage capacity.