Home > Living Fully > Expanding Your Horizons

Mighty Denali

A virtual tour with Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

The problem with this picture, which is one of my favorite Denali shots, is that it encompasses only a fraction of what you can see when you look out the plane's window.

I was so thrilled that I couldn't help smiling with sheer delight. One of our traveling companions said she wished she could have turned around in her seat far enough to snap my picture, 'cause I was beaming the whole time we were up.

I think the thrill was that we were flying right in the middle of these magnificent mountains and were so close it felt as though you could reach right out and touch them. In fact, we were close enough to see the base camp of some mountain climbers and their footprints as they trekked across the snow, which, as the title of this page says, looked very much like marshmallow cream on chocolate sundaes.

Talking about mountain climbers gives me a chance to give you a few statistics about these mountains and explain why Mt. McKinley, in our view, is misnamed.

These mountains are so large, the highest in North America, that they create their own -- severe -- weather system. The upper two-thirds are permanently snow-covered, with winds of 100 mph near the summit. We were particularly lucky (which was possibly compensation for the foggy, cool, misty weather we experienced in the Inside Passage) to see the peaks far in the distance from our hotel window in Anchorage and from the train. A friend tells me she went to Denali several times before the clouds cleared enough for her to see it.

Long before the white man came to this land of the north, the native people were intimately connected with this twin-peaked mountain they called Denali. However, the white man claims the right to determine the names of places based on the earliest published name. Not knowing this requirement, the natives hadn't bothered to write an article saying it was "Denali," although for a time it was known locally as Densmore's Peak, so they lost out.

It seems that back in the economic unrest of the 1890's the Democrats elected William Jennings Bryan on the Free Silver Platform for president of the United States. In response, the Republicans nominated William McKinley and pressed for maintenance of the less inflationary Gold Standard. Thus it was that when a reporter came to Alaska and asked W. A. Dickey, a gold prospector, what people called this impressive mountain, Dickey replied, "Well, sir, the folks around here calls that mountain McKinley."

Well, sir, the reporter went back home and repeated the fabrication. When map makers needed to put a name on their maps for this giant of a mountain, they searched back through their records and there, by golly, was the first name "official" mention, McKinley.

At least that's the story we were told.

So you see, people outside of Alaska usually aren't impressed if you say you're going to climb "Denali." They haven't heard of it. But McKinley? Wow. That's really something.

Actually, it really was something when in 1909 some guys who were prospectors -- not trained and experienced mountaineers -- climbed the South Peak, which is 19,470 feet. This Sourdough party planted a pole and came back down and said they had done it. Naw! You couldn't have, scoffed those who were sure no one who was "just" as prospector could have made it. But low and behold, a few years later, when some other guys went up, there was the pole alright.

The North peak, which at 12,320 feet is a mere 1,000 feet higher, was climbed by the Hudson STUCK expedition in 1913.

While I've hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states, at 14,494 feet, I've never been in the shape one needs to be in order to climb Denali (or McKinley in the white man's view). But I would love to be dropped off at a base camp and just sit there looking at this spectacular mountain. I would never be tired of looking -- a little oxygen-deprived perhaps, but never tired of admiring the majesty of such grandeur.

Continue the tour with My Favorite Travel Puzzle Picture

© Copyright 2000, Revised 2002, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT