To the Kuku Yalanji people, on whose country the mountain stands, this is no anonymous peak. Its twin summits carry names that make them kin: Barbar, the elder sister, and Ginpure, the younger - and together Ngalba-bulal, or Alpaboolal, 'the big top'. The mountain was understood as a home of ancestral spirits, a place woven into the law and story of the people who have lived in this rainforest for thousands of years. To read the two granite peaks as sisters is to see the land as family rather than scenery - a way of knowing country that long predates, and outlasts, any name pencilled onto a colonial chart. Stanley borrowed his name from Pieter Both, a jagged peak in distant Mauritius capped by a precariously balanced boulder; the Kuku Yalanji had already given these summits a kinship and a meaning that no resemblance to a foreign mountain could match.

The summit boulder is no easy prize, and the first recorded European ascent did not happen until October 1896 - and it happened only because Kuku Yalanji guides made it possible. Six of them, led by an elder, guided three visitors - the naturalist Dudley Le Souef among them - up through the rainforest and onto the northern peak. The detail is easy to pass over, but it deserves weight: the 'discovery' of the mountain's heights was no solo feat of European daring. It was achieved by men who already knew every fold of the country, leading newcomers up a mountain that had never been a mystery to them. The visitors got the published account; the guides got the climb done.

Mount Pieter Botte rises within the Wet Tropics of Queensland, a World Heritage rainforest so ancient and isolated that its mountaintops act like islands, each marooning species found almost nowhere else. The peak is one such refuge. A rare rainforest understorey tree of the genus Medicosma is known from a single specimen collected in this area. The primitive nut-bearing tree Eidothea zoexylocarya - a living link to forests that grew when dinosaurs walked - clings to these north Queensland summits, this mountain among them. And on Roaring Meg Creek nearby grows Romnalda ophiopogonoides, an endangered plant so scarce that only around 500 individuals are known to exist. To stand on this granite is to stand on an ark.

This is one of the least disturbed corners of the Australian tropics. The tableland behind Cape Tribulation is where the Daintree rainforest meets the Great Dividing Range's northern edge, a country of plunging gorges, leeches, mist and almost impossible greenery, with the bare grey crown of Pieter Botte rising above it all. There are no easy roads to the summit and no crowds; reaching its base means committing to rugged, trackless rainforest, through leech-rich gullies and creeks that feed waterfalls like nearby Roaring Meg. The peak draws a trickle of determined climbers each year, but it guards its summit boulder well, and most who set out simply come to see the grey granite tower break above the canopy. The mountain rewards the effort with something increasingly rare - a place that has never been tamed, never been cleared, never stopped belonging, in the deepest sense, to the people who named its peaks for sisters.