Bellenden Ker
Located about forty kilometres south of Cairns and eleven kilometres northwest of Babinda in the Bellenden Ker Range in Yidinjdji country, Mount Bellenden Ker is Queensland's second-highest peak, it is just over sixteen kilometres north-northwest of Mount Bartle Frere, the state's highest peak
Captain Phillip Parker King named the range in 1819 after botanist John Bellenden Ker Gawler.
Early visits to the area by Walter Hill, Queensland's first Colonial Botanist and Queensland Native Mounted Police Sub-Inspector Robert Arthur Johnstone's ascent of the peak were associated with George Elphinstone Dalrymple's North-East Coast expedition in 1873. Archibald Meston climbed the mountain in February or March 1889.
Today, the summit is home to television transmitter towers and Australia's wettest meteorological station. The latter monitors an annual average rainfall of 8,312 mm and holds records for the highest rainfall in a calendar year (12,461 mm in 2000) and the highest rainfall for a calendar month (5,387 mm in January 1979). The transmitter site and weather station can only be accessed by a privately owned cable car.
Sources:
- ABC News: Mount Bellenden Ker tower and cable car mark 50 years of broadcasting from the clouds
- Google Maps (directions and distances; my measurements)
- Wikipedia: Mount Bellenden Ker
