Aoraki/Mount Cook

Declared in 1953, it protects Aoraki/Mount Cook (3,724 m), the highest peak in New Zealand, whose Māori name — Aoraki — refers to a mythical ancestor turned to stone. It was here that Sir Edmund Hillary learnt to climb in the 1930s and 1940s, before becoming, with Tenzing Norgay, the first man to reach the summit of Everest in 1953; Hillary regularly used these mountains to train for his Himalayan expeditions. The park holds New Zealand's most extensive glaciers, the Tasman among them, though their accelerating retreat over recent decades has opened a rapidly growing proglacial lake where once there was nothing but solid ice.