Denali was renamed Mount McKinley in federal use by Executive Order 14172, signed on 20 January 2025 and implemented by the Interior Department on 24 January. It reversed a 2015 decision by Interior Secretary Sally Jewell that had restored the Koyukon Athabaskan name Denali after nearly a century of federal use of Mount McKinley. The mountain has therefore carried two official federal names within a single decade — while the national park around it has been Denali National Park and Preserve throughout, because that name was set by Congress in 1980.
A prospector, an argument about money, and 1896
The name Mount McKinley entered the record through a single person with no official standing. In 1896 a gold prospector named William Dickey, returning from the Susitna basin, published an account of the mountain in the New York Sun and called it after William McKinley, then a presidential candidate.
Dickey later explained the choice in unusually blunt terms: he had spent the season arguing with fellow prospectors who backed free silver, and naming the continent's highest mountain after the leading advocate of the gold standard was, in effect, having the last word. McKinley had never been to Alaska and never would. He was assassinated in 1901, and the name was formally adopted by the United States in 1917 — the same year Congress created Mount McKinley National Park.
That is the whole basis of the name: a campaign-season gesture by a private citizen, entered into official use two decades later.
What Denali means, and who had been saying it
Denali comes from Koyukon, an Athabaskan language of interior Alaska, where the form is roughly Deenaalee, meaning "the tall one" or "the high one." It was not one name among several. Athabaskan peoples across a wide arc of interior Alaska had cognate names for the peak, and it had functioned as the region's principal landmark for as long as anyone had lived within sight of it.
Nor was the Athabaskan connection incidental to the mountain's climbing history. When the first party reached the true summit on 7 June 1913, the first person to stand on top was Walter Harper, an Alaska Native of Koyukon Athabaskan descent, climbing with Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens and Robert Tatum. Three years earlier the Sourdough Expedition — a group of local prospectors — had climbed the lower North Peak, hauling a spruce pole up with them.
The mountain itself, which is more extreme than its number suggests
Denali stands 20,310 feet (6,190 metres). That figure is itself recent: a 2015 USGS survey revised it down from the long-quoted 20,320 feet.
The summit elevation understates the mountain. Its prominence — the drop to the lowest contour connecting it to anything higher — is 20,194 feet, making it the third most prominent peak on Earth after Everest and Aconcagua. And because it rises from a plain sitting at roughly 2,000 feet, its vertical relief from base to summit is about 18,000 feet, greater than Everest's rise above the Tibetan Plateau. Everest is far higher above sea level; Denali is a bigger single wall of mountain.
Latitude compounds it. At 63 degrees north, the atmosphere is thinner at a given elevation than it would be in the Himalaya, so Denali's summit feels physiologically higher than 20,310 feet, and its winter temperatures are among the coldest recorded on any mountain. Automated instruments left high on the mountain have logged air temperatures near minus 60 degrees Celsius, with wind chill well below that.
The mountain sits in the Alaska Range, a long arc thrown up along the Denali Fault — one of North America's major strike-slip faults, and the reason the range exists at all. The Pacific Plate is grinding north-west against North America here, and Denali happens to stand at a bend in the fault where that motion is forced upward rather than sideways. It is still rising.
Around 1,000 to 1,200 climbers attempt the summit each season, the great majority by the West Buttress route from a glacier landing strip on the Kahiltna at about 7,200 feet. Success rates hover near half, and the limiting factor is usually weather rather than technical difficulty: a storm cycle can pin a party in place for a week at altitude.
Forty years of a request that could not be heard
The Alaska state legislature formally asked the federal government to restore Denali in 1975. Under normal procedure the US Board on Geographic Names would have taken it up, and given that the board's default is to defer to local usage, the outcome would not have been in much doubt.
It never got that far. Ralph Regula, a congressman representing Canton, Ohio — McKinley's home town and burial place — repeatedly introduced legislation to keep the name. That was enough, because the board has a standing rule against acting on a name while related legislation is pending before Congress. Regula did not need to win a vote. He only needed a bill on the docket, and he kept one there for decades. Alaska's request sat unresolved from 1975 until 2015.
One partial resolution did get through. The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 expanded Mount McKinley National Park and renamed it Denali National Park and Preserve. From that point the park and the mountain inside it carried different names, which is why the current situation is less novel than it looks.
Why Ohio cared
The persistence of the Ohio objection is easier to understand with the local geography in front of you. McKinley was born in Niles, practised law in Canton, ran his 1896 front-porch campaign from his Canton house, and is buried there under the McKinley National Memorial, a domed mausoleum on a hill above the city with a McKinley museum beside it. Canton's identity is bound up with him in a way that few American cities are bound up with a president.
Ohio's argument was never that McKinley had a connection to Alaska. It was that a name in continuous federal use since 1917 should not be discarded, and that the mountain was one of the few national-scale memorials to a president who was assassinated in office. Alaska's argument was that a name in continuous local use for far longer had been displaced by a stranger's magazine article. Both positions were sincerely held and neither was going to persuade the other, which is exactly the sort of stalemate the Board on Geographic Names is designed to resolve — and was procedurally prevented from resolving.
2015: the Secretary acts
On 28 August 2015, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell issued a secretarial order restoring Denali as the federal name. The legal route around the congressional stalemate was a provision of federal naming law allowing the Secretary of the Interior to act where the board has not, after a reasonable period. Jewell's stated view was that forty years was an unreasonable amount of time for a state's request to go unanswered.
Reaction split geographically rather than by party. Alaska's Republican senators supported the restoration. Ohio's delegation objected across party lines. That pattern held in 2025.
2025: the reversal, and what it did not touch
EO 14172 restored Mount McKinley for federal purposes alongside its better-known clause creating the Gulf of America. Interior implemented it on 24 January 2025 and GNIS was updated accordingly.
Alaskan opposition was again bipartisan. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, said they preferred Denali. Polling found a majority of Alaskans opposed the reversion. Statewide usage did not change at all — Alaska adopted Denali as its own official name in 1975 and never stopped using it.
Crucially, the park kept its name. Denali National Park and Preserve was established by statute, and an executive order cannot rewrite an act of Congress. So the current federal position is that Mount McKinley stands inside Denali National Park — an inversion of the 1980-2015 arrangement, when Denali stood inside a park that had by then already been renamed.
Two names on one mountain
In practice the mountain has two working names and the split runs along familiar lines. Federal databases and federal publications say Mount McKinley. The State of Alaska, the National Park Service's park name, the climbing community, Alaska Native communities and most Alaskans say Denali. Air traffic, guiding companies and local signage largely say Denali.
That is not unusual. Plenty of features carry a local name and an official one that diverge, and mapping platforms increasingly resolve the difference by serving different labels to different users rather than picking a winner. What is unusual is the speed: two reversals in ten years on the highest point in North America.
The pattern is also recognisable. As with Lake Ontario and the Gulf, the name being displaced in 2025 was the older one, and it was Indigenous. The board has spent much of the last sixty years moving in the opposite direction, from the removal of racial slurs from federal names beginning in 1962 to the renaming of Clingmans Dome as Kuwohi in 2024.
For the mountain rather than the argument, see our guide to Denali, the Great One of North America and the Denali National Park guide; for how these decisions are made at all, who decides what places are called.