Denali National Park and Preserve, formerly known as Mount McKinley National Park, is a United States national park and preserve located in Interior Alaska, centered on Denali, the highest mountain in North America. The park and contiguous preserve encompass which is larger than the state of New Hampshire. On December 2, 1980, of Mount McKinley's Wilderness was established within the park. Denali's landscape is a mix of forest at the lowest elevations, including deciduous taiga, with tundra at middle elevations, and glaciers, snow, and bare rock at the highest elevations. The longest glacier is Kahiltna Glacier. Wintertime activities include dog sledding, cross-country skiing, and snowmobiling. The park received 543,300 recreational visitors in 2025.
History
Prehistory and protohistory Human habitation in the Denali Region extends back more than 11,000 years, with documented sites just outside the park boundaries dating back more than 8,000 years. However, relatively few archaeological sites have been documented within the park boundaries, owing to the region's high elevation, harsh winter conditions, and scarce resources compared to lower elevations. The oldest site within park boundaries is the Teklanika River site, dated to about 7130 BC. More than 84 archaeological sites have been documented within the park. The sites are typically characterized as hunting camps rather than settlements and provide little cultural context. The presence of Athabaskan peoples in the region is dated to 1,500 - 1,000 years before present on linguistic and archaeological evidence, while researchers have proposed that Athabaskans may have inhabited the area for thousands of years before then. The principal groups in the park area in the last 500 years include the Koyukon, Tanana, and Dena'ina people.Norris, Vol. 1, pp. 2–3
Establishment of the park In 1906, conservationist Charles Alexander Sheldon proposed preserving the Denali region as a national park. He presented the plan to his co-members of the Boone and Crockett Club. They decided that the political climate at the time was unfavorable for congressional action and that the best hope of success rested on the approval and support of the Alaskans themselves. Sheldon wrote, "The first step was to secure the approval and cooperation of the delegate who represented Alaska in Congress."
In October 1915, Sheldon took up the matter with E. W. Nelson of the Biological Survey at Washington, D.C., and with George Bird Grinnell, to introduce a suitable bill in the coming session of Congress. The matter was then presented to the Game Committee of the Boone and Crockett Club and, after a full discussion, the committee endorsed it.
On December 3, 1915, the plan was presented to Alaska's delegate, James Wickersham, who, after some deliberation, gave his approval. The plan was then presented to the executive committee of the Boone and Crockett Club and, on December 15, 1915, was unanimously accepted. The plan was thereupon endorsed by the club and presented to Stephen Mather, Assistant Secretary of the Interior in Washington, D.C., who immediately approved it.
The bill was introduced in April 1916 by Delegate Wickersham in the House and by Senator Key Pittman of Nevada in the Senate. Much lobbying took place the following year, and on February 19, 1917, the bill passed. On February 26, 1917, 11 years after its conception, the bill was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, thereby creating Mount McKinley National Park.
A portion of Denali, excluding the summit, was included in the original park boundary. The boundary was expanded in 1922 and again in 1932 and 1947 to include the area of the hotel and railroad.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1921, the Mount McKinley Park Hotel opened. In July 1923, President Warren Harding stopped at McKinley Park Station, site of the Mount McKinley Park Hotel, while touring the length of the Alaska Railroad as part of his Voyage of Understanding tour; he drove a golden spike marking the railroad's completion at Nenana on July 15, 1923. The flat-roofed, two-story log building had open balconies, glazed windows, and electric lighting. Inside were about two dozen guest rooms along with a store, lunch counter, kitchen, and storeroom. Guests in the 1930s reported vermin, soiled linen, drafty rooms, and poor food. The hotel closed later that decade as trade shifted to lodgings deeper in the park, such as Savage Camp. After being abandoned for many years, the hotel was destroyed in 1972 by a fire.
Fourteen log cabins were built in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a network of shelters for patrolling park rangers throughout the park. They were listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
The Park Road was completed in 1938 after 17 years of construction.
There was no road access to the park entrance until 1957 when the Denali Highway opened; park attendance greatly expanded: there were 5,000 visitors in 1956 and 25,000 visitors by 1958. In 1971, the George Parks Highway, under piecemeal construction for several years, was completed, providing direct highway connections to Anchorage and Fairbanks. Visitation doubled to 88,000 from 1971 to 1972. With the increase in visitors, the park closed most of the Park Road that year to private vehicles and required visitors to take shuttle buses.
In 1967, the park was the site of one of the deadliest mountaineering accidents in the United States with the Mount McKinley disaster, where seven climbers died in an intense blizzard on Denali. The Park Service debated closing the mountain to climbing in the wake of the accident, but ultimately decided to keep it open.
The park was designated an international biosphere reserve in 1976. A surrounding Denali National Monument was proclaimed by President Jimmy Carter on December 1, 1978, which was combined with the park in 1980.
Naming dispute
The name of Mount McKinley National Park was subject to local criticism from the beginning. The word Denali means "the high one" in the native Athabaskan language and refers to the mountain itself. The mountain was named after the newly elected US president, William McKinley, in 1897 by local prospector William A. Dickey. The United States government formally adopted the name Mount McKinley after President Wilson signed the bill creating Mount McKinley National Park in 1917.Sheldon, Charles (1931). A History of The Boone and Crockett Club. Boone and Crockett Club. pp. 54–59. In 1980, Mount McKinley National Park was combined with Denali National Monument, and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act named the combined unit the Denali National Park and Preserve. At that time, the Alaska State Board of Geographic Names changed the mountain's name to Denali. However, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names did not recognize the change and continued to use the official name, Mount McKinley. This situation lasted until August 30, 2015, when President Barack Obama directed Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell to rename the mountain to Denali, using statutory authority to act on requests when the Board of Geographic Names does not do so in a "reasonable" period.McKinley no more: North America's tallest peak to be renamed Denali . Martinson, Erica. Alaska Dispatch News, 30 August 2015 At the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to revert the name of the mountain to Mount McKinley, while explicitly leaving the name of the national park and preserve unchanged. Renaming the park unit itself would likely require an act of Congress, as the U.S. Board on Geographic Names generally lacks authority over federal land units named and established by Congress.
Recent decades In 1992, Christopher McCandless ventured into the Alaskan wilderness and settled in an abandoned bus in the park on the Stampede Trail at , near Lake Wentitika. He carried little food or equipment and hoped to live for a time in solitude. Almost four months later, McCandless's starved remains were found, weighing only . His story has been widely publicized via articles, books, and films, and the bus where his remains were found has become a shrine attracting people from around the world.
On November 5, 2012, the United States Mint released the 15th coin of its America the Beautiful Quarters series, which honors Denali National Park. The coin's reverse features a Dall sheep against a background of Denali.
In September 2013, President Barack Obama signed the Denali National Park Improvement Act into law. The statute allows the United States Department of the Interior to "issue permits for microhydroelectric projects in the Kantishna Hills area of the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska"; it authorizes the Department of the Interior and a company called Doyon Tourism, Inc. to exchange some land in the area; it authorizes the National Park Service (NPS) to "issue permits to construct a natural gas pipeline in the Denali National Park"; and it renames the existing Talkeetna Ranger Station the Walter Harper Talkeetna Ranger Station. The National Parks Conservation Association supported the bill because the legislation "takes a thoughtful approach to protecting roadless Alaska, promoting renewable energy development, and honoring native Alaskans".
On September 24, 2020, the Museum of The North at the University of Alaska (Fairbanks) announced it became the permanent home of McCandless's 'Magic Bus 142' where it will be restored and an outdoor exhibit will be created.
Effective August 24, 2021, the park's facilities west of Denali Park Road Mile 43 were abruptly closed due to a slow-moving landslide at Polychrome Pass which made travel unsafe. The Pretty Rocks Landslide had been ongoing for decades, but it had previously moved slowly enough that NPS had kept the road open by pouring in up to 100 truckloads of gravel per week. Melting permafrost caused the rate of movement to accelerate from a few inches per year, prior to 2014, to more than ten inches per day, at which point the pass was closed and all campers staying west of the pass evacuated."Denali National Park Closes Section of Park Road Due to Landslide Activity", Denali National Park and Preserve, National Park Service, August 24, 2021. A road bridge avoiding the affected area was constructed, and park officials intend to reopen the road in the summer of 2027.
Geography
Denali National Park and Preserve includes the central, highest portion of the Alaska Range, along with many glaciers and glacial valleys that flow southward out of the range. To the north, the park and preserve encompass the valleys of the McKinley, Toklat, and Foraker Rivers, as well as the Kantishna and Wyoming Hills. The George Parks Highway runs along the eastern edge of the park, crossing the Alaska Range at the divide between the valleys of the Chultina River and the Nenana River. The entrance to the park is about south of Healy. The Denali Visitor Center and the park headquarters are located just inside the entrance. Preserve lands are located on the west side of the park, with one parcel encompassing areas of lakes in the Highpower Creek and Muddy River areas, and the second preserve area covering the southwest end of the Alaska Range around Mount Dall. In contrast to the park, where hunting is prohibited or restricted to subsistence hunting by residents, sport hunting is allowed in the preserve lands. Nikolai, Telida, Lake Minchumina, and Cantwell residents are authorized to hunt inside the park because large portions of these communities historically hunted in the area for subsistence purposes.