Park History

British explorer George Vancouver may have been the first European to lay eyes on Denali (Mt. McKinley).

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Park History Details

The dramatic landscape in central Alaska that would become Denali is young by geological terms, full of sharp-edged mountains yet unworn by eons of erosion and still riven by earthquakes as the continents grind against each other and reshape the land. Yet the climate here has remained more or less the same for at least the past 10,000 years, when the glaciers retreated and the boreal forests advanced. That helped provide stability for the park's prehistoric human inhabitants, whose presence in Denali has been dated to the late Pleistocene and early Holocene epochs. The Athabaskan tribal people who gave Denali ("The Great One") its name are the original inhabitants of central Alaska; hunting and habitation sites have been uncovered in the area of Wonder Lake, along the Teklanika River, and at the upland Bull River site. British explorer George Vancouver may have been the first European to lay eyes on Denali (a.k.a. Mt. McKinley), in 1794. Prospectors came to the Kantishna area in the late 19th century in search of gold, and in the early 20th century the first attempts were made to reach the summit of Denali. The 20,320-foot south summit was finally reached in 1913, with native Alaskan Walter Harper the first man to stand atop North America's highest peak. A few years prior, the idea first was floated to preserve the mountain and surrounding lands as Alaska's first National Park. It took a few years, but Congress passed legislation establishing Mount McKinley National Park in 1917. A hotel was soon built at the entrance, and President Warren Harding visited the park on a rail journey through Alaska in 1923. The park boundaries were expanded in 1980 when the formerly separate Park and Preserve were combined and renamed from McKinley to Denali. Today, the Park, Preserve and Wilderness areas of Denali total more than six million acres.

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