Denali

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Denali, the tallest peak on the continent, recorded a temperature of -75.5 degrees Fahrenheit on the 1st of December 2003. The reading came from an instrument station high on its slopes in the Alaska Range, in the interior of the U.S. state of Alaska. Behind that number sit three puzzles. What forces pushed such an enormous mass of rock into the sky? Who first stood on top, and why did several early claimants fail to convince anyone? And how did one mountain end up with two names that the federal government has swapped back and forth?

  9895963

• 2. Rock and Ice

  ›

  Pink quartz monzonite makes up most of Denali. This granitic body, called a pluton, has been lifted skyward by tectonic pressure from the Pacific plate sliding beneath the North American plate. While the rock rose, erosion stripped away the sedimentary material that once surrounded and covered it. The same forces set off many deep earthquakes across Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. Beneath Denali, the Pacific Plate stays seismically active in a zone known as the McKinley cluster.

  A curve in the Denali Fault explains why the ground here climbs so high. The fault slips in a right-lateral direction, under stresses created as the Yakutat microplate dives at a low angle beneath Alaska. Along a stretch about 75 kilometres long, the fault bends gently, forming what is called a restraining bend. That curvature creates a space problem. As sideways motion continues, compression at the bend squeezes the crust straight upward. The longer the crust stays inside the bend, the taller the topography grows. North of the bend, recently mapped normal faults slip at roughly 2-6 millimetres a year and help the crust cope with the unusual curve.

  Five large glaciers drain the massif. The Peters Glacier lies on the northwest side, while the Muldrow Glacier falls from the northeast slopes. The Traleika Glacier abuts the eastern flank just beside the Muldrow, and the Ruth Glacier lies to the southeast. The Kahiltna Glacier leads up to the southwest side. At 44 miles, it is the longest glacier in the Alaska Range.

  The massif has two summits, and the South Summit is the higher one. The North Summit stands at 19,470 feet, with a prominence of about 1,270 feet. Some lists count it as a separate peak and others do not. Climbers rarely visit it unless they are following north-side routes. Mount Foraker, Mount Hunter and the Moose's Tooth stand among the neighbouring peaks.

  1112131464

• 3. Measuring the Giant

  ›

  On the 24th of June 2015, a survey team led by Blaine Horner placed two global positioning receivers on Denali's summit. They found the snow there to be 15 feet deep. The National Geodetic Survey later settled on an elevation of 20,310 feet. On the 2nd of September 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey reported the same figure. That was ten feet lower than the 20,320 feet obtained in 1952 by measuring from photographs.

  A gold digger from New Hampshire, living in Seattle, first put the mountain's height in front of the public. William Dickey had been working the sands of the Susitna River, and his account appeared in the New York Sun on the 24th of January 1897. He wrote: "We have no doubt that this peak is the highest in North America, and estimate that it is over 20000 ft high." Until then, Mount Logan in Canada's Yukon Territory had been believed to be the continent's highest point. Dickey later said he carried no instruments and judged the height from atmospheric conditions and the likely distance to the base. He also admitted that other prospector parties had guessed the same. The surveyor Robert Muldrow confirmed the estimate in 1898, measuring 20,300 feet.

  How tall a mountain looks depends on where the tape starts. Denali rises from a sloping plain between 1,000 and 3,000 feet, which gives a base-to-peak height of 17,000 to 19,000 feet. Mount Everest begins much higher, at 13,800 feet on its south side and 17,100 feet on the Tibetan Plateau. Its base-to-peak height therefore falls between 12,000 and 15,300 feet. The volcano Mauna Kea measures 33,500 feet, though most of it lies under water, and Denali's rise is little more than half of that.

  Other numbers set Denali apart. Its topographic prominence is 20,156 feet, and its topographic isolation is 4,621.1 miles. Only Mount Everest and Aconcagua beat it on both counts, which makes Denali third on each list. It is also the northernmost mountain above 6,000 metres anywhere in the world. The same prospector who made that 1897 guess famous also chose the name that would cause a century of argument.

  123616

• 4. Names and Politics

  ›

  Indigenous names for the mountain survive in seven Alaskan languages, and they fall into two families of meaning. South of the Alaska Range, Dena'ina and Ahtna speakers use names translated as "big mountain". North of the range, speakers of Lower Tanana, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, Holikachuk and Deg Xinag use names meaning "the high one" or "the tall one". The Koyukon Athabaskans, who live around the mountain, have said Dinale or Denali for centuries, from their word for high or tall.

  Russian-ruled Alaska knew the peak as Bolshaya Gora, a direct translation meaning big mountain. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it was briefly called Densmore's Mountain. The name honoured Frank Densmore, a gold prospector and the first non-native resident of Alaska to reach its base. Then, in 1896, the prospector William Dickey named it Mount McKinley, to show support for presidential candidate William McKinley. McKinley won the presidency the following year.

  The United States formally recognized that name when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Mount McKinley National Park Act on the 26th of February 1917. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the north and south peaks the Churchill Peaks, in honor of Winston Churchill. In 1975, the Alaska Board of Geographic Names changed the state name to Denali, matching local usage. The Alaska legislature asked the United States Board on Geographic Names to follow. Ohio congressman Ralph Regula blocked that request, and his district included McKinley's home town of Canton.

  Forty years later, in late August 2015, the Obama administration made Denali the official federal name. The move came just ahead of a presidential visit to Alaska. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said it had been "a long time coming". Alaska's senior senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, who had introduced legislation for the change, praised it. Several Ohio politicians objected, including Governor John Kasich, Senator Rob Portman, House speaker John Boehner and Representative Bob Gibbs. Gibbs called it "constitutional overreach" and argued that an act of Congress was required.

  The Alaska Dispatch News reported that the interior secretary may change geographic names if the Board of Geographic Names fails to act within a reasonable period. Jewell told the paper: "I think any of us would think that 40 years is an unreasonable amount of time."

  In December 2024, President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to restore the McKinley name in honor of William McKinley. He had proposed a change in 2017 too, and Alaska's Republican governor Mike Dunleavy opposed it. Both Republican senators from Alaska, Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, strongly opposed the 2017 idea. In 2024 they and the Democratic state senator Scott Kawasaki again said they preferred Denali. On the 20th of January 2025, Trump signed an executive order requiring the interior secretary to revert the name within 30 days. The order leaves the name of Denali National Park unchanged.

  On the 23rd of January 2025, the Department of the Interior made the change. The Associated Press announced the same day that it would use Mount McKinley. Its reasoning was that a president has authority over the federal names of features within national borders.

  Will Mayo, a former president of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, which represents 42 Athabaskan tribes in the Alaskan interior, spoke about the mountain's meaning. He said: "It's not one homogeneous belief structure around the mountain, but we all agree that we're all deeply gratified by the acknowledgment of the importance of Denali to Alaska's people." Alaska's official database of business licenses shows that businesses named after Denali outnumber those named after McKinley by six to one.

  452425217

• 5. Early Attempts

  ›

  At 7,500 feet on the 4th of August 1902, the scientist Alfred Brooks met sheer ice, left a small cairn and turned back. He had set out alone in good weather, aiming for a shoulder at 10,000 feet. Climbing had never been in his party's plans, he wrote later, and they had merely delayed a day "that we might actually set foot on the slopes of the mountain". In January 1903, National Geographic published a "Plan For Climbing Mt McKinley", co-authored by Brooks and the topographer D. L. Raeburn. It urged future climbers to approach from the north. Within a year, two parties announced they would try.

  Judge James Wickersham, then of Eagle, Alaska, led the first recorded attempt in the early summer of 1903, with four others. They took a steamer up the Kantishna river, then used a poling boat, mules and backpacks along Chitsia Creek. Tanana Athabaskan people they met suggested that route. Residents of an Athabaskan hunting camp called Anotoktilon then gave detailed directions to the glaciers at the mountain's foot. From a base camp on the lower Peters Glacier, the party tried the northwest buttress of the north peak. Crevasses and an ice fall forced them onto a spur reached via Jeffery Glacier.

  At about 10,000 feet, the spur failed to connect as it had seemed to from below. Wickersham wrote of "a tremendous precipice beyond which we cannot go. Our only line of further ascent would be to climb the vertical wall of the mountain at our left, and that is impossible." The wall rises 15,000 feet from the glacier and is now called the Wickersham Wall. Avalanche danger kept anyone from climbing it successfully until 1963.

  Dr. Frederick Cook led his own party of five later that summer. He had served on successful arctic expeditions commanded by both Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen. Yet he struggled for funding and organized the trip on a shoestring budget, with no other experienced climbers. His party also used the Peters Glacier, but managed to pass the ice fall that had stopped Wickersham. On the 31st of August 1903, at about 10,900 feet on the northwest buttress of the north peak, they reached a dead end. On the way down, they became the first climbing party to circle the mountain. Their trek of 1,000 miles also found an accessible pass northeast of the Muldrow Glacier.

  In 1906, Cook returned with the co-leader Herschel Parker, a Columbia University professor of electrical engineering. Belmore Browne and five other men made up the rest of the group. They spent most of the summer exploring the southern and southeastern approaches. Their high point on the Tokositna glacier lay 25 miles from the summit. In September, Cook and the horseman Robert Barrill made one more try, which Cook later called "a last desperate attempt" in a telegram to his backers. After 12 days, they claimed the summit by way of the Ruth Glacier.

  Parker and Browne doubted the claim at once. Browne wrote that no one could walk from the Brooklyn Bridge to Grant's Tomb in ten minutes, and he said Cook's story was just as impossible. Harper's Magazine published Cook's account in May 1907, along with a photograph that seemed to show Barrill on the summit. By 1909 Barrill had recanted at least part of his story, yet Cook kept insisting.

  In 1956, the mountaineer Bradford Washburn and Walter Gonnason tried to settle the matter. Washburn found a spot at 5,400 feet and 19 miles southeast of the summit that looked identical to the summit photograph. Then, in 1998, the historian Robert Bryce found an uncropped original of the "fake peak" photograph. Its wider view of the surroundings appeared to discount Cook's claim for good.

  2555565751

• 6. The Pole and the Summit

  ›

  Bettors in a Fairbanks tavern helped pay for the supplies and dogs of four Alaska residents who set out in late December 1909. Tom Lloyd, Peter Anderson, Billy Taylor and Charles McGonagall wanted the first-ascent honors to go to local men. By March 1910, they had made a base camp and were pushing up the Muldrow glacier from the north. They found a pass, since named McGonagall Pass, that let them bypass the Wickersham Wall. At roughly 11,000 feet, Lloyd, older and less fit than the others, stayed behind.

  The remaining three followed Karstens Ridge around the Harper Icefall, then reached the upper basin and Pioneer Ridge. They carried a spruce pole 14 feet long. At about 19,000 feet, McGonagall, exhausted from hauling the pole, stopped. On the 3rd of April 1910, Taylor and Anderson scrambled the last few hundred feet to the north peak, at 19,470 feet. They planted the pole near the top, hoping people below would see it.

  Back in Fairbanks, the accounts conflicted. Lloyd claimed all four men had reached both the north and the higher south peak. The author Jon Waterman, who explored the controversy in his book Chasing Denali, listed reasons for doubt. There was no photographic evidence. They climbed in winter, along a route that has never been fully replicated. They were inexperienced climbers without the usual safety gear and with no care for altitude sickness. They also claimed to climb from 11,000 feet to the top in under 18 hours, which was unheard of when siege-style alpinism was the norm. Yet Waterman said: "these guys were men of the trail. They didn't care what anybody thought. They were just tough SOBs." He added that they were largely unlettered, and that their clumsiness with the press and the climbing establishment fed some of the doubt.

  In 1912, the Parker-Browne expedition turned back within a few hundred yards of the top because of harsh weather. On the 7th of July, the day after their descent, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake shattered the glacier they had climbed.

  The earthquake still shaped the next year's attempt. Hudson Stuck and Harry Karstens directed the 1913 party, with Walter Harper and Robert Tatum. Karstens had come to Alaska in the gold rush of 1897 and later helped set up dog mushing mail routes. Stuck was an English-born Episcopal priest who climbed mountains as a hobby. Harper, 21, was the Alaska-born son of a Koyukon-Athabascan mother and an Irish gold prospector. Tatum, also 21, was a theology student at a Tanana mission, and his main job was cooking.

  The team approached from the north by the Muldrow glacier and McGonagall pass. At a camp near 10,800 feet, a stray match set fire to supplies, including several tents. The earthquake had also turned a gentle slope into a dangerous, ice-strewn morass on a knife-edged ridge, later named Karstens Ridge. Parker and Browne had climbed that stretch in no more than three days. Karstens and Harper took three weeks, cutting steps into the ice.

  On the 30th of May, the team reached a high camp at 17,500 feet in the Grand Basin between the two peaks. They made their summit attempt on the 7th of June 1913, in temperatures that sometimes fell below -20 degrees Fahrenheit. Every man suffered from altitude sickness, Stuck most of all. By midday Harper became the first to reach the top, and Tatum and Karstens arrived seconds after him. Stuck came last and fell unconscious on the summit.

  Tatum later said: "The view from the top of Mount McKinley is like looking out the windows of Heaven!" Stuck, who preferred the name Denali and used it almost exclusively in his account, scanned the north summit with binoculars. He saw a large pole there, which supports the Sourdough claim, and many people today believe the four men did reach the north peak. Apart from Stuck's sighting and a later report from a group friendly with some Sourdough men, no one has reported seeing it. Stuck also learned that the Parker-Browne party had stopped only about 200 feet of elevation short of the true summit. The wider climbing world showed muted interest, and Appalachia Journal, then the official journal of the American Alpine Club, printed only a small notice a year later.

  5960666770

• 7. Routes and Records

  ›

  Bradford Washburn pioneered the West Buttress in 1951, after an extensive study of aerial photographs. It is considered the safest and easiest line, and the vast majority of climbers use it. Most expeditions take two to four weeks. In 2003, about 58% of climbers reached the top, yet by then the mountain had claimed the lives of nearly 100 mountaineers. Denali is also one of the Seven Summits, and climbing all of them is a challenge for mountaineers.

  The statistics are sobering. From 1947 to 2018 in the United States, 2,799 people were reported involved in mountaineering accidents, and 11% of those accidents happened on Denali. Of the 2,799 accidents, 43% ended in death, and Denali accounted for 8% of those deaths.

  The worst single episode came in 1967. Seven members of Joe Wilcox's twelve-man expedition died while stranded for ten days near the summit, in what has been described as the worst storm on record. At the time it was the third worst disaster in mountaineering history by lives lost. Before July 1967, only four men had ever died on Denali.

  The mountain has also rewarded invention. A party including Alfred Lindley, Grant Pearson and Erling Strom made the second ascent in 1932, climbing both peaks. In 1947, Barbara Washburn became the first woman to reach the summit, and her husband Bradford became the first person to summit twice. In 1954, George Argus, Morton Wood and Les Viereck climbed the long South Buttress with Elton Thayer, who died on the descent. Worsening conditions behind them forced the survivors to make the first traverse of the mountain. The Great Traleika Cirque, where they had camped just below the summit, was renamed Thayer Basin in his honor.

  The Cassin Ridge, first climbed in 1961 by a team led by Riccardo Cassin, is the best-known technical route. Charlie Porter made the first solo ascent of it in 1976, a climb described as "ahead of its time". In 1963, two teams made first ascents of two different routes on the Wickersham Wall. A decade after the first winter ascent in 1967 by Gregg Blomberg, Dave Johnston, Art Davidson and Ray Genet, the mountain still held plenty of firsts.

  Naomi Uemura made the first solo ascent in 1970. The same year, an all-female team nicknamed the "Denali Damsels" reached the summit. It was led by Grace Hoeman and Arlene Blum, with Margaret Clark, Margaret Young, Faye Kerr and Dana Smith Isherwood. In 1972, Sylvain Saudan, known as "Skier of the Impossible", made the first ski descent of the sheer southwest face. In 1979, Susan Butcher, Ray Genet, Brian Okonek, Joe Redington, Sr., and Robert Stapleton made the first ascent by dog team.

  Winter brought both triumph and loss. In 1984, Uemura returned for the first winter solo ascent but died after reaching the summit. That year Tono Krizo, Frantisek Korl and Blazej Adam of the Slovak Mountaineering Association climbed a very direct line on the south face, now called the Slovak Route. Sarah Doherty became the first amputee to reach the summit in August. In 1988, Vern Tejas completed the first successful winter solo ascent of the West Buttress, climbing in February and March. In 1989, the Japanese climbers Noboru Yamada and Kozo Komatsu died on a winter attempt of the same route, apparently from a fall and exposure.

  Speed became its own contest. In 1990, Anatoli Boukreev climbed the West Rib from base to summit in 10 hours and 30 minutes, a record at the time. In 1995, the French skiers Jean-Noel Urban and Nicolas Bonhomme made the first ski descent of the Wickersham Wall, most of which is steeper than 50 degrees. On the 20th of June 2019, the Swiss-Ecuadorian Karl Egloff set new records: 7 hours 40 minutes up, and 11 hours 44 minutes round trip from a base camp at 7,200 feet on the Kahiltna Glacier.

  7375819377

• 8. Science and Culture

  ›

  The Japanese Alpine Club installed a meteorological station at 18,733 feet on a ridge near the summit in 1990. In 1998, it was donated to the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In June 2002, a new station went in at 19,000 feet, designed to send data in real time to climbers and scientists. Its instruments are custom built for extreme weather and altitude, and are upgraded every year. It is the third-highest weather station in the world.

  On the 30th of November 2003, a temperature of -74.4 degrees Fahrenheit combined with an 18.4 mile-per-hour wind to produce a North American record windchill of -118.1 degrees. Even in July, the station has logged temperatures as low as -22.9 degrees and windchills as low as -59.2 degrees.

  The mountain kept cold records long before that. In 1932, the Lindley expedition recovered a self-recording minimum thermometer that Stuck and Karstens had left near Browne Tower at about 15,000 feet in 1913. Its scale ran down to -95 degrees, and the lowest reading was below that. Harry J. Liek carried it to Washington, D.C., where the United States Weather Bureau found it accurate. It had recorded approximately -100 degrees. A thermometer placed at the same height by the U.S. Army Natick Laboratory, from 1950 to 1969, also recorded a low of -100 degrees.

  Scientists have honored the mountain in species names. Ceratozetella denaliensis is a species of moss mite. Magnoavipes denaliensis, meaning "bird with large feet found in Denali", is a bird footprint from the Upper Cretaceous of Alaska. It was made by a three-toed, heron-like bird as large as a sandhill crane. Erigeron denalii, the Denali fleabane, is a flower, while Erebia mackinleyensis is a butterfly known as the Mt. McKinley alpine.

  On the 5th of November 2012, the United States Mint released a quarter depicting Denali National Park. It was the fifteenth coin of the America the Beautiful Quarters series. The reverse shows a Dall sheep with the peak in the background. In 2019, the animated educational series Molly of Denali premiered on PBS and CBC Kids. It follows a young Alaska Native girl and vlogger, and it has been praised for its representation of Indigenous Alaskan culture. In the serialized fiction 17776, a cannon built on top of Denali fires footballs at the continental United States.

  9596989948