The Book of the National Parks

by Robert Sterling Yard

V

McKINLEY, GIANT OF GIANTS

Mount McKinley National Park, Alaska. Area, about 2,200 Square Miles

The monster mountain of this continent, "the majestic, snow-crowned American monarch," as General Greeley called it, was made a national park in 1917. Mount McKinley rises 20,300 feet above tide-water, and 17,000 feet above the eyes of the beholder standing on the plateau at its base. Scenically, it is the highest mountain in the world, for those summits of the Andes and Himalayas which are loftier as measured from sea level, can be viewed closely only from valleys whose altitudes range from 10,000 to 15,000 feet. Its enormous bulk is shrouded in perpetual snow two-thirds down from its summit, and the foothills and broad plains upon its north and west are populated with mountain sheep and caribou in unprecedented numbers.

To appreciate Mount McKinley's place among national parks, one must know what it means in the anatomy of the continent. The western margin of North America is bordered by a broad mountainous belt known as the Pacific System, which extends from Mexico northwesterly into and through Alaska, to the very end of the Aleutian Islands, and includes such celebrated ranges as the Sierra Nevada, the Cascade, and the St. Elias. In Alaska, at the head of Cook Inlet, it swings a sharp curve to the southwest and becomes Alaska's mountain axis. This sharp curve, for all the world like a monstrous granite hinge connecting the northwesterly and southwesterly limbs of the System, is the gigantic Alaska Range, which is higher and broader than the Sierra Nevada, and of greater relief and extent than the Alps. Near the centre of this range, its climax in position, height, bulk, and majesty, stands Mount McKinley. Its glistening peak can be seen on clear days in most directions for two hundred miles.

For many years Mount St. Elias, with its eighteen thousand feet of altitude, was considered North America's loftiest summit. That was because it stands in that part of Alaska which was first developed. The Klondike region, far northward, was well on the way to development before McKinley became officially recognized as the mountain climax of the continent. But that does not mean that it remained unknown. The natives of the Cook Inlet country on the east knew it as Doleika, and tell you that it is the rock which a god threw at his eloping wife. They say it was once a volcano, which is not the fact. The Aleutes on the south called it Traleika, the big mountain. The natives of the Kuskokwim country on the west knew it as Denalai, the god, father of the great range. The Russians who established the first permanent white settlement in Alaska on Kodiak Island knew it as Bulshia Gora, the great mountain. Captain Cook, who in 1778 explored the inlet which since has borne his name, does not mention it, but Vancouver in 1794 unquestionably meant it in his reference to "distant stupendous mountains."

After the United States acquired Alaska, in 1867, there is little mention of it for some years. But Frank Densmore, an explorer of 1889, entered the Kuskokwim region, and took such glowing accounts of its magnificence back to the Yukon that for years it was known through the settlements as Densmore's Mountain. In 1885 Lieutenant Henry C. Allen, U.S.A., made a sketch of the range from his skin boat on the Tanana River, a hundred and fifty miles away, which is the earliest known picture of McKinley.

Meantime the neighborhood was invaded by prospectors from both sides. The Cook Inlet gold fields were exploited in 1894. Two years later W.A. Dickey and his partner, Monks, two young Princeton graduates, exploring north from their workings, recognized the mountain's commanding proportions and named it Mount McKinley, by which it rapidly became known, and was entered on the early maps. With crude instruments improvised on the spot, Dickey estimated the mountain's height as twenty thousand feet—a real achievement. When Belmore Browne, who climbed the great peak in 1912, asked Dickey why he chose the name, Dickey told him that he was so disgusted with the free-silver arguments of men travelling with him that he named the mountain after the most ardent gold-standard man he knew.

The War Department sent several parties to the region during the next few years to explore, and the United States Geological Survey, beginning in 1898 with the Eldridge-Muldrow party, has had topographical and geological parties in the region almost continuously since. In 1915 the Government began the railroad from Seward to Fairbanks. Its course lies from Cook Inlet up the Susitna River to the headwaters of the Nenana River, where it crosses the range. This will make access to the region easy and comfortable. It was to safeguard the enormous game herds from the hordes of hunters which the railroad was expected to bring rather than to conserve an alpine region scenically unequalled that Congress set aside twenty-two hundred square miles under the name of the Mount McKinley National Park.