The Name of the Highest Peak in North America

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Following President Trump’s announcement that the mountain previously known as “Denali”will once again be known as “Mt. McKinley,” a handful of well-regarded mountaineers went on record with their disapproval. As with the Gulf of America, certain publications refuse to accept the name change. Wikipedia now refers to it as “Denali, federally designated as Mount McKinley.” The mountain had been known as “Mt. McKinley” from at least 1917 until 2015, when the Obama administration officially recognized the mountain’s “sacred status…to generations of Alaska Natives” and ordered that it would henceforth be officially known by its original Athabaskan name, “Denali,” meaning “the Great One.”

Mt. Everest was named for Sir George Everest, the British Surveyor General of India. Of course, the usual suspects have clamored for officially naming the mountain “Sagarmatha” (which it is called by the Nepalis) or “Chomolungma” (which it is called by the Tibetans). The first man to ascend Everest was Sir Edmund Hillary from New Zealand, who did so in 1953, though some have argued quite convincingly that it may have been British mountaineer George Mallory in 1924. Mallory’s body was located in 1999. Many of his personal items and gear were with him. The glacier goggles in his pocket (as opposed to on his face), the handwritten pressure readings of his oxygen canisters (indicating he had enough to summit), and the absence of a photograph of his wife Ruth (which he’d vowed to leave on the summit) are sufficient evidence for some to conclude that Mallory beat Hillary to the summit by 29 years.

Frederick Cook, an American physician, claimed to be the first to summit Mt. McKinley in 1906. The claim could not, however, be substantiated, and following Cook’s later fraud conviction and imprisonment related to oil speculation, it became widely accepted that Native Alaskan, Walter Harper (Alaskan Statehood Act was enacted in 1958) was the first to summit in 1913. Harper’s father was an Irish immigrant and his mother was Koyukan, one of the Alaska Native Athabascan tribes. Harper’s father died of tuberculosis when he was two and so he was raised by his mother.

Assuming, as most people do, that Harper was the first to summit Mt. McKinley and that he did so nearly a half century before the Alaskan Statehood Act, an argument can be made that calling the mountain “Denali” is fitting and appropriate. A counterargument is that Harper was merely a junior member of an expeditionary group and that while he may have been the first to actually summit, others ascended with him, including Robert Tatum, an American who planted an improvised American flag made from red, white, and blue handkerchiefs. Another counterargument — perhaps the strongest — is that after Alaskan Statehood, the indigenous name became irrelevant.

But, of course, all of this is beside the point. President Trump re-named it (or re-re-named it) Mt. McKinley by Executive Order 14172. So, notwithstanding impotent complaints, Wikipedia misinformation, or arguments about first ascents, “Mt. McKinley” is the name of the mountain.

After the executive order, Senator Linda Murkowski immediately introduced legislation to re-designate the mountain “Denali.” She also complained about President Trump needlessly politicizing the mountain. But mountains and mountaineering have long been political. Aside from issues like territorial disputes, war, and foreign travel restrictions — which have led to redrawn mountain boundaries and mountains being off limits to mountaineers — early high-altitude mountaineering tactics were inherently political.

Until quite recently, mountaineers took a militaristic, “assault-like” approach to climbing 8,000 meter peaks. This approach involves massive funding and usually state sponsorship. Throughout the early 1900s and well into the 1950s, team leaders were sometimes retired or active military officers. They would acquire and ship tons of gear and provisions that would be carried by hundreds – sometimes thousands – of local porters, who had a propensity to strike and demand higher wages the moment the expedition reached a point of no return. Porters would be selected and paid through a home country liaison officer or embassy representative. The team leader would establish a base camp and then establish progressively higher camps, all of which needed to be meticulously supplied before making a push for the summit.

Even expeditions that were not full-fledged mountain assaults, were nevertheless intertwined with politics. In 1950, Frenchman Maurice Herzog was the first to summit an eight thousand meter peak. He hoisted the French flag atop Annapurna and when he returned to France, he spent close to a year recovering in hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he had all of his fingers and toes amputated due to frostbite. France was still emerging from World War II and was in the midst of various political crises when Le Figaro reported the summit. Herzog became a national hero and his achievement was often cited during political speeches to celebrate French greatness as the country was economically rebounding from the war. His book “Annapurna” sold millions of copies and he was appointed minister for youth and sport by Charles DeGaulle before eventually serving as the mayor of Chamonix. Hillary summited Everest a few days before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, who quickly knighted him. That one-week period in 1953 was likely the high water mark for post-World War II nationalist pride in the United Kingdom. In 1990, the great American climber Jim Whitaker led a “Peace Climb” of Everest that brought together American, Chinese, and Soviet climbers. In advance of the expedition, however, Whitaker had to promise that no one nation would summit without the other two, and Whitaker spent a good portion of the expedition trying to reign in the defiant Soviet climbers.

Reinhold Messner, arguably the greatest mountaineer, largely reinvented mountaineering in the 1970s and 1980s by climbing “Alpine style,” meaning he was lightly equipped and avoided supplemental oxygen and fixed ropes. He was the first to summit Everest alone and the first to summit Everest with no supplemental oxygen at a time when doctors said it was either impossible or that doing so would cause profound brain damage. Messner made it a point to never carry a flag to the summit of a mountain. After soloing Everest and planting no flag, he said “I am my own fatherland.” This individualistic attitude is understandable when you know Messner’s backstory. Messner was born in the midst of World War II in South Tyrol, an autonomous, German-speaking region within Italy. South Tyrol had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1920, when it was annexed by Italy. In 1939, under an “option agreement,” native German-speaking, South Tyrolese like the Messners were forced to choose between emigrating to Germany or remaining in Italy and submitting to Italianization. Before making the choice, however, the Germans occupied South Tyrol, conscripted Messner’s father, and sent him to the Russian front.

After the era of assault-like approaches ended and mountaineering became a big business, prominent gear companies, apparel companies, and guiding services spoke ill of the pre-Messner era and promoted Indigenous “land acknowledgements.” By way of example, one of the biggest outdoor apparel companies stated: “We are a white-led outdoor company reliant on recreation on stolen Native lands that are not yet safe for all.” One of the largest guiding companies stated: “Indigenous peoples around the world were displaced from their homelands violently, and many if not all of the peaks we climb lie on lands that were wrested from native inhabitants. It is important to recognize this history.”

The Trump Administration’s re-naming of the mountain is a declaration that so-called land acknowledgements are of a piece with the larger un-American and anti-white agenda. It is also a declaration that we are once again unabashedly planting our flag, just as Robert Tatum did with his red, white, and blue handkerchiefs.