The highest mountain in North America is Denali in the Alaska Range of the United States, at 6,190 m (20,310 ft) above sea level according to a U.S. Geological Survey measurement in September 2015. Its federal name was changed back to Mount McKinley in January 2025; Denali, the Koyukon name, is the one the State of Alaska adopted in 1975. It rises about 5,500 m above the surrounding lowlands, one of the greatest base-to-summit rises of any mountain on land, and was first climbed on 7 June 1913. Second is Mount Logan in Canada's Yukon (5,959 m) and third is Pico de Orizaba in Mexico (5,636 m), so the continent's ten highest summits belong to just three countries.
| Rank | Mountain | Country (state or territory) | Range | Height |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Denali | United States (Alaska) | Alaska Range | 6,190 m (20,310 ft) |
| 2 | Mount Logan | Canada (Yukon) | Saint Elias Mountains | 5,959 m (19,551 ft) |
| 3 | Pico de Orizaba | Mexico (Puebla, Veracruz) | Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt | 5,636 m (18,491 ft) |
| 4 | Mount Saint Elias | United States / Canada | Saint Elias Mountains | 5,489 m (18,009 ft) |
| 5 | Popocatépetl | Mexico | Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt | 5,413 m (17,759 ft) |
| 6 | Mount Foraker | United States (Alaska) | Alaska Range | 5,304 m (17,400 ft) |
| 7 | Mount Lucania | Canada (Yukon) | Saint Elias Mountains | 5,260 m (17,257 ft) |
| 8 | Iztaccíhuatl | Mexico | Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt | 5,213 m (17,103 ft) |
| 9 | King Peak | Canada (Yukon) | Saint Elias Mountains | 5,173 m (16,972 ft) |
| 10 | Mount Bona | United States (Alaska) | Saint Elias Mountains | 5,044 m (16,550 ft) |
The ranking is taken from Wikipedia's "List of the highest major summits of North America", which includes only summits with at least 500 m of topographic prominence. Individual mountain articles sometimes give slightly different figures (Popocatépetl appears as 5,393 m and 5,426 m in different articles, Iztaccíhuatl as 5,230 m and Lucania as 5,240 m), but none of those differences changes the order of the top three.
Three countries, and only three small corners of them: southern Alaska and the southwest Yukon, which hold seven of the ten, and a strip of central Mexico, which holds the other three. Nothing in the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada or the Coast Mountains comes close. The reasons are tectonic first, and then a matter of latitude, ice and measurement.
Alaska and the Yukon: the Yakutat microplate jammed under the continent
The Saint Elias Mountains, which straddle the Alaska–Yukon border and reach into the far northwest of British Columbia, are the highest coastal range on Earth. They exist because of the Yakutat microplate, a wedge-shaped oceanic plateau 20 to 30 km thick that is moving northwest at about 50 mm a year relative to North America. The neighbouring Pacific Plate has crust only about 7 km thick; the Yakutat block is thick enough to be buoyant, so as it is pushed under the continent its sediment cover, up to 12 km deep, is scraped off and the overriding edge of North America is lifted. The highest summits cluster where the plate boundary changes from sideways sliding to head-on collision, a zone geologists call the St. Elias syntaxis.
That collision explains five of the ten names in the table. Mount Logan (5,959 m), Canada's highest mountain, sits in Kluane National Park and Reserve less than 40 km from the Alaska border; Wikipedia notes it is believed to have the largest base circumference of any non-volcanic mountain on Earth, with eleven peaks over 5,000 m on one massif, and it is still rising by about 0.35 mm a year. Mount Saint Elias (5,489 m) stands only about 18 km from the Pacific and rises its full height within 16 km of the head of Taan Fjord, off Icy Bay. Mount Lucania (5,260 m) is a separate Yukon massif linked by a long ridge to Mount Steele, King Peak (5,173 m) is a satellite just west of Logan, and Mount Bona (5,044 m), a stratovolcano on a sedimentary platform, is the highest volcano in the United States.
History put these Yukon peaks in Canada and the coastal ones in the United States. Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, and the boundary that was later surveyed through the range runs right over Mount Saint Elias, which is why it ranks second-highest in both countries. The Duke of the Abruzzi named both Lucania and Bona in 1897 while standing on the summit of Saint Elias after its first ascent, Lucania after the ship that carried his expedition from Liverpool and Bona after his racing yacht.
The Denali Fault bend that lifts the Alaska Range
The same Yakutat plate, pushed at a low angle underneath Alaska, also built Denali, in the interior of Alaska. Its stresses drive the Denali Fault, a right-lateral fault along which crust slides sideways. Near the mountain the fault curves through a gentle restraining bend about 75 km long; crust moving through that bend has nowhere to go but up, and the longer it stays in the bend the higher it is pushed. Denali itself is a granite pluton, mostly pink quartz monzonite, whose overlying sediment has been stripped away by erosion.
The result is a mountain that stands on a low base. Denali rises from a plain at roughly 300 to 900 m, so its relief of about 5,500 m from base to summit exceeds that of Everest, which starts from the high Tibetan Plateau. Its prominence of 6,144 m is the third-largest on Earth, after Everest and Aconcagua. Its neighbour Mount Foraker (5,304 m), 23 km to the southwest, rises directly above the standard Denali base camp on the Kahiltna Glacier and is the third-highest peak in the United States.
The mountain's isolation delayed its climbing history. James Wickersham made the first recorded attempt in 1903; Frederick Cook claimed a first ascent in 1906, a claim that has never been verified and whose legitimacy has long been questioned. Denali's topographic isolation of about 7,437 km, the distance to the nearest higher ground, is also the third-largest on Earth.
Mexico's volcanoes on the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt
Mexico's three entries have a different cause. The Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt is a continental volcanic arc about 1,000 km long, running from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico between latitudes 18°30'N and 21°30'N. It formed over millions of years as the Rivera and Cocos plates subducted beneath the North American plate along the Middle America Trench, and melting above the sinking slabs fed a chain of large stratovolcanoes.
Pico de Orizaba, or Citlaltépetl ("star mountain" in Náhuatl), stands on the Puebla–Veracruz border at the belt's eastern end and outranks every other volcano in North America; it last erupted in the 19th century. Popocatépetl, "smoking mountain", 70 km southeast of Mexico City, is an active stratovolcano, and its glaciers were gone by early 2001, partly because of warmer temperatures and largely because of renewed eruptions. Iztaccíhuatl, "white woman", is its dormant twin to the north across the Paso de Cortés saddle, and both stand in Izta-Popo Zoquiapan National Park. Popocatépetl was once one of three Mexican peaks with glaciers; Orizaba and Iztaccíhuatl, the lowest Mexican peak with permanent glaciers, still carry them.
Why the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada and Greenland miss the top 10
The mountain belts most people picture when they think of North America are simply lower. Mount Elbert in Colorado, the highest summit of the entire Rocky Mountains, is 4,401 m (14,440 ft). Mount Whitney in California's Sierra Nevada, the highest point in the contiguous United States, is 4,421 m (14,505 ft). Canada's highest peak lying wholly in British Columbia, Mount Waddington in the Coast Mountains, reaches about 4,019 m. Even Whitney falls more than 600 m short of Mount Bona in tenth place, and Waddington more than a kilometre. The tallest ground on the continent is concentrated where plates are colliding or subducting today, along the Pacific edge in Alaska and in central Mexico.
The rest of the continent is lower still. Volcán Tajumulco in Guatemala, the highest mountain in Central America, is 4,203 m. Gunnbjørn Fjeld, Greenland's highest point, is a nunatak whose height is usually given as about 3,700 m. In the Caribbean, Pico Duarte in the Dominican Republic reaches 3,101 m.
Measurement has also shaped the list. Before May 1992, Mount Logan's height was quoted anywhere from 5,959 to 6,050 m, until a Geological Survey of Canada team fixed 5,959 m by GPS. Denali was given as 20,320 ft (6,194 m) from 1952 photogrammetry until the 2015 USGS survey lowered it by 10 ft. Mount Bona's height is still uncertain: older USGS maps show 16,421 ft (5,005 m), and it may or may not stand higher than Mount Steele in the Yukon, so Bona is described as either the tenth- or eleventh-highest peak in North America.
Latitude makes these heights feel greater than the numbers suggest. Denali, at about 63°N, is the northernmost mountain above 6,000 m in the world, and on Logan's summit plateau, at about 5,000 m, winter air temperatures hover around −45 °C. The first verified ascent of Denali, on 7 June 1913, was made by Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Walter Harper and Robert Tatum; Bradford Washburn's West Buttress route of 1951 is now the standard way up. For more on the park around it, see our Denali guide, and for how Alaska's ranges fit together, the geography of Alaska; the Andean summits that outrank all of these are counted in the world's highest volcanoes.