Denali National Park and Preserve is a 24,464 km² (9,446 sq mi) wilderness in Interior Alaska, larger than the state of New Hampshire, built around Denali, at 6,190 m (20,310 ft) the highest mountain in North America. Almost everyone sees it from a single gravel route, the 92-mile (148 km) Denali Park Road, which runs west from the George Parks Highway past Savage River, Polychrome Pass, the Eielson Visitor Center and Wonder Lake to the old mining camp of Kantishna. The park was created as Mount McKinley National Park in 1917, enlarged and renamed in 1980, and received 543,300 recreational visitors in 2025. Since August 2021 the road has been closed beyond Mile 43 because of the Pretty Rocks landslide at Polychrome Pass; a bridge has been built around the slide, and the park plans to reopen the full road in summer 2027.
Mile 0 to Mile 15: Riley Creek, the Kennels and Savage River
The park entrance lies about 18 km (11 miles) south of the town of Healy, on the George Parks Highway, which was completed in 1971 and links the park to both Anchorage and Fairbanks. The road's early history explains its character. The Park Road took 17 years to build and was finished in 1938, but there was no highway to the entrance until the Denali Highway opened in 1957. Attendance jumped from 5,000 visitors in 1956 to 25,000 by 1958, and when the Parks Highway arrived, visitation doubled to 88,000 between 1971 and 1972. That surge led the park to close most of the road to private cars in 1972 and move visitors onto buses, the system that still defines a trip here.
The land the road crosses was protected in stages. The conservationist Charles Sheldon proposed a park in 1906, and President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill creating Mount McKinley National Park on 26 February 1917. The area was named an international biosphere reserve in 1976, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed a surrounding Denali National Monument in December 1978, and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 merged the two as Denali National Park and Preserve. Today the unit is split into a 19,186 km² national park and a 5,278 km² national preserve on its western side, while the old pre-1980 park, about 8,687 km², is designated wilderness. The road runs through that wilderness core.
The first mile holds the Denali Bus Depot, the departure point for shuttles and tours. The Denali Visitor Center is at Mile 1.5, near the Murie Science and Learning Center, the Alaska Railroad depot served by the Denali Star train from mid-May to mid-September, and Riley Creek campground. A short way in are the park headquarters and the only sled dog kennel owned by the US federal government. Rangers first used dog teams in 1922 to patrol against poaching, and the kennel still breeds Alaskan huskies for winter work, with sledding demonstrations for summer visitors.
Only the first 15 miles (24 km) of the road, as far as the Savage River Bridge, are paved, because permafrost and the freeze-thaw cycle make a paved surface very costly to maintain further in. Private vehicles may drive this stretch, which has the Savage River campground and a loop trail along the river. Beyond Savage River, the interior is reached only by tour and shuttle buses. The treeline here is about 760 m (2,500 ft), so the road quickly climbs out of spruce taiga into open tundra.
Teklanika, Igloo Canyon and Polychrome Pass: Miles 15 to 46
West of Savage River the road follows the northern flank of the Alaska Range past the valleys of the Sanctuary and Teklanika rivers. Teklanika River is one of the three campgrounds open to private vehicles, while camper buses serve the Sanctuary River and Igloo Creek campgrounds. The Teklanika valley also holds the oldest archaeological site found inside the park boundaries, dated to about 7130 BC; people have lived in the wider Denali region for more than 11,000 years. Near the Teklanika rest stop, kettle lakes fill hollows left where buried blocks of glacier ice melted out beneath the till.
Polychrome Pass, roughly at the halfway point of the road, takes its name from the colours of the Cantwell Volcanics, layers of basalt, rhyolite and ash exposed in the slopes above the road. Kettle lakes are visible from the Polychrome Overlook as well, and the road here is cut into a steep, crumbling hillside. It is also where the road gave way, as the Pretty Rocks section below explains.
Toklat, Eielson, Wonder Lake and Kantishna: Miles 53 to 92
When the full road is open, every shuttle and tour bus stops at the Toklat River Contact Station at Mile 53. The Eielson Visitor Center, at Mile 66, is about four hours from the entrance by bus and has ranger programmes in summer and, on clear days, the closest roadside view of Denali and the Alaska Range. Its window facing the mountain carries an etched outline of the peaks, so visitors can see where Denali would be when cloud hides it. Near Mile 49 there are ice-wedge polygons, patterned ground formed as frozen soil cracks, fills with water and refreezes year after year.
Wonder Lake lies about six hours from the visitor centre. It is 4.2 km (2.6 miles) long and 85 m (280 ft) deep, and it was excavated by the Muldrow Glacier about 14,000 years ago. The Muldrow, 51 km (32 miles) long, is a large glacier on the north side of the range; it has surged twice in the last hundred years, and in 2021 it was advancing up to about 27 m (90 ft) a day. Wonder Lake campground is the furthest the camper buses go. Three miles further, the road ends at Kantishna, founded as a gold mining camp in 1905 at the junction of Eureka and Moose creeks, at about 517 m (1,696 ft). Its remote lodges, including the Kantishna Roadhouse and Denali Backcountry Lodge, are reached by lodge buses on a trip of more than six hours, or by air taxi.
Denali From the Road: When "the Mountain Is Out"
Denali (federally designated Mount McKinley since January 2025) is a granite pluton, mostly pink quartz monzonite, lifted by the subduction of the Pacific plate beneath the North American plate. It rises from a plain at roughly 300 to 910 m (1,000 to 3,000 ft), so its base-to-summit rise of about 5,500 m (18,000 ft) is among the greatest of any mountain on land. A US Geological Survey measurement in September 2015 put the summit at 6,190 m (20,310 ft). Only a portion of the mountain, excluding the summit, lay inside the original 1917 park boundary. For more on climbing history and the summit itself, see our guide to Denali and Mount McKinley.
The mountain is so large that it makes its own weather, and cloud often wraps it. It is commonly said that only about 30 per cent of visitors see Denali at all, and around 10 per cent see it clear from base to summit; locals say "the mountain is out" when it appears. The Alaska Range also sits on the Denali Fault, a strike-slip system more than 2,100 km (1,300 miles) long; more than 600 earthquakes are recorded in the park area each year, and a magnitude 7.9 quake on 3 November 2002, centred 48 km east of the park, ruptured the ground for 336 km. Glaciers cover about 16 per cent of the park. The longest, the Kahiltna, runs 71 km (44 miles) from the mountain's southwest flank and is the longest glacier in the whole Alaska Range; the southeastern side of the range carries the most extensive ice because moist winds from the Gulf of Alaska drop more snow there, while the shorter Muldrow drains the north side towards the road.
Grizzlies, Wolves and Dall Sheep on the Tundra
The road is the park's main wildlife-viewing route, and buses stop when animals are near. Park estimates put 300 to 350 grizzly bears on the north side of the Alaska Range and about 2,700 black bears in the park. In 2014 biologists were monitoring about 51 wolves in 13 packs; the park's wolves were also the subject of Adolph Murie's 1944 study The Wolves of Mount McKinley. Surveys counted 2,230 caribou in 2013 and 1,477 moose in 2011, and Dall sheep are often seen on the mountainsides; one appears with Denali on the 2012 America the Beautiful quarter honouring the park. Arctic ground squirrels, hoary marmots, snowshoe hares, red foxes, lynx and wolverines also live in the park. Feeding animals is banned, and areas around wolf and bear dens or fresh kills are closed when needed.
Pretty Rocks: The Landslide That Stopped the Road at Mile 43 in 2021
The Pretty Rocks Landslide at Polychrome Pass had been creeping for decades. It is driven by thawing permafrost, which in Denali lies 9 to 30 m (30 to 100 ft) below a seasonal active layer; around 75 per cent of the park had near-surface permafrost in the 1950s. For years crews kept the road open by tipping in up to 100 truckloads of gravel a week. Movement then sped up from a few inches a year before 2014 to more than ten inches a day in 2021. On 24 August 2021 the park closed all facilities west of Mile 43 and evacuated campers beyond the pass. A bridge has since been built to carry the road around the slide, and the park intends to reopen the full road to Kantishna in summer 2027.
The closure has reshaped visits. Buses turn back near Mile 43, so Toklat, Eielson and Wonder Lake are out of reach by bus, and visitation, which recovered to 543,300 in 2025, is still below the 2019 peak. Winter is different again: snow closes the road beyond headquarters from October to April, and the park is visited by skiers, snowshoers and dog teams. To place the park within the state's wider mountains, glaciers and rivers, read our overview of Alaska's geography.