The peninsula was charted by European ships in the 1790s and named for the French naval officer Jean-Michel Huon de Kermadec, who died of illness in 1793 during d'Entrecasteaux's expedition searching for the lost La Perouse. His name stuck to the land because of European cartographic convention, not because anyone here used it. The people who actually live on the Huon Peninsula have been here for at least 40,000 years - long before French ships, long before coffee plantations, long before missionaries. Archaeologists working the upland terraces have recovered stone tools that age, arranged on what appear to be cultivated surfaces. These are among the oldest evidence of agriculture anywhere in the world. Dozens of distinct languages are spoken across the peninsula today, a density of linguistic diversity found only in New Guinea and the adjacent islands - one of the gifts of a landscape where every next valley required a new vocabulary.

High in the mossy cloud forests of the Saruwaged Range lives a creature that seems to defy its own biology: a kangaroo that climbs trees. Matschie's tree-kangaroo, the Huon tree-kangaroo, is endemic to this peninsula and nowhere else. It has the thick russet coat of a montane mammal, the pouch of a marsupial, the claws of a climber, and the soft waddle of a creature that evolved its kangaroo-ness on the ground before finding reasons to go up. The bird life is just as improbable. The endemic Huon astrapia is a bird of paradise whose male grows tail feathers more than three times the length of its body. The rainforest on the higher slopes of the Cromwell Range holds the best-preserved large forest of Dacrydium conifers in the entire southern hemisphere - a scrap of ancient Gondwanan vegetation still standing where the ice never reached.

In September 1943, Australian and American forces took Lae in a two-pronged operation that caught the Japanese between an amphibious landing and a paratrooper drop. The Japanese survivors did not surrender. Instead, they did something extraordinary: they walked out north over the Saruwaged Range, at elevations over 4,000 meters, in tropical uniforms, with whatever food they could carry. The Huon Peninsula campaign that followed, from September 1943 into early 1944, pursued them along the coast and over the interior ridges. Australian troops took Finschhafen - the old German town on the east coast - and pushed them steadily to Sio on the north shore. Thousands of Japanese died in the mountain crossing itself, victims of altitude, cold, hunger, and the terrain their maps had not adequately described. By early 1944 the peninsula was clear.

In 2009, the people of the Yopno, Uruwa and Som river valleys in the peninsula's mountainous interior did something their ancestors had done in their own way for millennia: they agreed on how to share and protect their land. Backed by Conservation International and the scientist Lisa Dabek, 50 clans pledged sections of their territory into the YUS Conservation Area, the first in Papua New Guinea legally protected under a new national act. YUS covers over 760 square kilometers of cloud forest and tree-kangaroo habitat. The clans retain ownership. Decisions about hunting, gardening, and access stay with them. In a country where conservation schemes often run aground on the fact that almost all land is traditionally owned, YUS represents something that actually works - protection from the ground up, led by the people who live there.

Walk the coast near Sialum on the north side of the peninsula and the raised terraces are impossible to miss. Each step represents an ancient sea level stand, fossilized at the moment a coral reef was lifted out of the water and preserved in stone. The dates run from about 125,000 years ago at the top to the still-rising modern reef at the bottom. To geologists, these are diagnostic - they allow precise reconstruction of ancient ocean chemistry, ice-age cycles, and the pace of tectonic uplift. To everyone else, they look like what they are: a beach that kept going up instead of staying put. The people who farm these terraces know them intimately. Some use fences woven from Piper aduncum stems to stop erosion on the steep faces. The work is slow and the soil is thin. But the view from up there, looking out over the Solomon Sea and the Vitiaz Strait toward New Britain, is worth the climb.