Denali: The Mountain They Called McKinley for Ninety-Eight Years

The Athabascan name for the mountain appears in the records of Interior Alaska long before any European arrived to rename it. Denali: the great one. The people of the region had been calling it that for centuries, because the mountain is, in fact, great, the highest peak in North America at twenty thousand three hundred ten feet, a mass so large it generates its own weather systems and is visible from Anchorage on clear days, a hundred and sixty miles away.

In eighteen ninety-seven, a gold prospector from Ohio named William Dickey wrote an article for the New York Sun proposing the name Mount McKinley, after the presidential candidate William McKinley, whom Dickey supported. McKinley had never been to Alaska. He had no connection to the mountain. He was simply the candidate Dickey liked. Congress formalized the name in nineteen seventeen when the national park around the mountain was established as Mount McKinley National Park.

The state of Alaska officially recognized the name Denali in nineteen seventy-five. The federal government did not. For forty years, the mountain had two names depending on whether you were talking to state or federal authorities.

President Obama resolved the conflict by executive order on August thirtieth, two thousand fifteen. The mountain became Denali in federal records, restoring the name that had been there first.

The national park itself had already been renamed Denali National Park and Preserve back in nineteen eighty, decades before the mountain's federal name caught up. Its six million acres contain the Alaska Range, three of the highest peaks on the continent, and one of the most intact subarctic ecosystems remaining on earth. The mountain itself, at the center of all of it, was known by its right name long before anyone thought to change it.