Anyone who’s had a good look at Alaska’s 20,237-foot Denali (still officially named Mount McKinley), can tell you about the first time they saw it. Even from viewpoints on the Parks Highway a few dozen miles away, the relief is stunning: giant snow-covered buttresses climbing for miles to an icy summit, 19,000 feet up from where you stand.
Climbing writer David Roberts, whose young team put up the first ascent of the 14,000-foot high Wickersham Wall Direct on Denali in 1963, wrote in the introduction to Mount McKinley: The Conquest of Denali, about his team’s first sight of the mountain from 30 miles away, at midnight that June: “It was impossible that a mountain that far away could take up that much of the sky; but there it was. … In my twenty-eight years of climbing since that midnight at Wonder Lake, I have never had another view of any mountain that affected me half so powerfully.”
Personality
Denali is large enough to create its own weather systems, and often (up to half the time) is obscured by clouds—no doubt to the disappointment of many of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who make the pilgrimage to see it each year. Temperatures on the mountain can drop to minus 75 degrees Fahrenheit, with windchill down to minus 118 degrees Fahrenheit. The high temperature at the 14,200-foot camp during May, the peak of the climbing season, is typically around freezing.
Every other mountain taller than 20,000 feet lies between the latitudes of 43 degrees north (roughly the latitude of Minneapolis) and 32 degrees south (roughly the latitude of Cape Town, South Africa). Denali sits just below the Arctic Circle, at 63 degrees north. Its northern latitude means it has lower barometric pressure than it would if it were nearer to the Equator, so it actually feels higher than it is, or rather, the air feels thinner. It’s been said that if Mount Everest were at the same latitude as Denali, it would feel 3,000 feet higher and would be impossible to climb without supplemental oxygen.
Denali’s base-to-peak rise is considered the largest of any mountain on earth: 18,000 feet. The mountain has hundreds of named and unnamed glaciers, some starting as high as 19,000 feet and some reaching as far down as 800 feet. The enormous Muldrow, Kahiltna and Ruth glaciers are all more than 30 miles long, with the Kahiltna stretching 44 miles.
The Name
The naming of North America’s highest peak has been debated since 1896, when a gold prospector declared it Mount McKinley, in support of then-presidential candidate William McKinley. Prior to that, it had been known by its Athabascan name, Denali, meaning “The High One.” In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the bill establishing Mount McKinley National Park, officially recognizing the name as McKinley. The first request to change the name to “Denali” came from the Alaska state legislature in 1975, and was blocked by U.S. Rep Ralph Regula, who represented William McKinley’s hometown, Canton, Ohio. Continued efforts by the Alaska legislature to have the U.S. Board on Geographic Names change the mountain’s name have been blocked by members of the Ohio legislature ever since. The national park containing the mountain is officially named “Denali National Park.”
The First Ascent
On September 16, 1906, explorer Dr. Frederick Cook and Ed Barrill stood on the summit of Denali. It was a triumphant conclusion to efforts in Alaska for Cook, who led an impressive circumnavigation of the mountain on his first attempt to climb it in 1903 (the party turned around a little higher than 11,000 feet on the peak’s northwest buttress), and then spent months in 1906 trying to find a route that would go to the summit.
Or so Cook would have the world believe. Doubts didn’t surface until almost three years later, when Cook’s claim to have been the first to reach the North Pole were also disputed. Later expeditions found flaws in Cook’s descriptions of the summit route and other details, and in 1997, Robert Bryce proved that Cook’s “summit photo” of Barrill was actually taken on top of a 5,338-foot mountain in the Ruth Gorge, 19 miles southeast of the summit of Denali. The mountain was later named “Fake Peak.”
The Real First Ascent
After word got out that Cook had potentially made the whole thing up, a group of locals decided the proper thing was for an Alaskan to climb it. In the winter of 1910, a group of four miners with no mountaineering experience, later known as the Sourdough Expedition, spent three months on the mountain. Billy Taylor and Pete Anderson eventually reached the North Peak in an 18-hour push on April 1, erecting a 14-foot spruce flagpole at 18,700 feet as evidence of their climb. They had summited. The only problem was that Denali’s North Peak isn’t the highest part of the two-peaked mountain: It’s 19,470 feet tall, about 700 feet shorter than the South Peak.
In 1912, Belmore Browne, Herschel Parker and Merl LaVoy spent almost five months approaching Denali from the seaside town of Seward, and attempting a valiant climb of the South Peak. They reached a spot about 200 yards shy of the summit, an almost flat walk in good weather, and were beaten back by high winds and snow. Browne later wrote that seeing the summit was “a sight that will haunt me to my dying day.”
In March 1913, a party led by Archdeacon Hudson Stuck and Harry Karstens set off for the mountain, walking literally in the footsteps of the 1912 expedition for much of their climb. The party spent much of their three-month expedition performing the back-breaking work of hauling loads, chopping steps in the ice and snow, and sometimes building bridges across crevasses out of sawed blocks of snow. Four men reached the summit on June 7, 1913, the first being Alaska native Walter Harper, followed by Stuck, Karstens, and Robert Tatum.
Bradford Washburn
Bradford Washburn went on his first expedition to Alaska in 1930, and between then and 1955, he led visionary expeditions to unclimbed, sometimes even unapproached, Alaskan peaks. His passion for reconnoitering the mountains in Alaska was unparalleled, often having him hanging out the door of a small plane with his large-format camera, shooting frames of the snowy peaks below. Those photos inspired many a young alpinist to make an attempt on an unclimbed line in Alaska, some on Denali. But Washburn’s greatest gift to mountaineers might be Denali’s West Buttress Route, which he pioneered in 1951 on his third and final climb of the mountain. The route became the most-climbed route on the mountain, chosen by almost 90 percent of climbers who attempt any route on Denali today.
The West Buttress
A climb of the West Buttress Route is a serious commitment, not the least of which is finding the three weeks (minimum) required to mount a summit attempt. It’s all on snow, involves six to eight camps, is non-technical, and is never steeper than 55 degrees. Of the more than 1,000 climbers who attempt the West Buttress each year, only about half are successful.
The typical climb begins with a flight to Base Camp at 7,200 feet on the Kahiltna Glacier, followed by several days (up to two weeks) moving camps and ferrying supplies higher on the mountain. Climbers spend several days at the 14,200-foot camp, waiting for a weather window, eventually starting a summit day from High Camp at 17,200 feet and climbing to the summit in a day.
See For Yourself
Several guide services offer climbs of the West Buttress and other routes, all requiring three weeks’ commitment (and around $7,400 per person) on the mountain. Most guide services require solid prior mountaineering and glacier-travel experience in order to sign up for a climb, sometimes shown by a prior climb of Mount Rainier, a winter Presidential Traverse, and/or experience at high altitude on other mountains such as Pico de Orizaba or Kilimanjaro.
Just seeing Denali is much less of a commitment, but carries the same 50 percent chance of success as climbing it. The peak is visible (on a clear day) from several points on the Parks Highway north of Anchorage. For a view from inside the park, reserve a spot on a Denali National Park shuttle bus and take an 85-mile ride through the park (the road is closed to cars) to a lunch stop at Wonder Lake—the ride is 11 hours round-trip, and although you’re not guaranteed to see the mountain, it’s almost certain you’ll see bears and moose.
Getting There
From Anchorage, drive 240 miles north on AK 3 to Denali National Park and Preserve. Denali is visible from several viewpoints on AK 3.
Resources
Guide Services:
- Alaska Mountaineering School
- Alpine Ascents
- American Alpine Institute
- Mountain Trip
- Rainier Mountaineering, Inc.
Photography by Angela Crampton