Climbing the World's Highest Mountains - Mount McKinley

Peaks of Glory
Climbing the World's Highest Mountains
by Stefano Ardito

Mount McKinley
Trecherous Jaws of Ice

"The mountains of Alaska are not the tallest in the world; the great summits of the Himalayas tower a good thousand or two thousand meters above them. But in the Himalayas, the snowline is at five or six thousand meters. Around Mount McKinley, the entire region is blanketed by perennial snow and ice."

With these words, Claude F. Kusk described the scene more than eighty years ago, as the first expedition set out to scale the tallest mountain in North America.

Kusk was certainly correct. In the state that Czar Alenander II sold to the United States in 1867, the great mountain chains form one of the most inhospitable and savage expanses of wilderness in the world.

The climate at the top of McKinley is among the harshest in the world, outside of the polar regions.

Much the same may be said for Mount Deborah, Mount Saint Lhas, and Mount Logan--for all of the major peaks in Canada's British Columbia and in Alaska, caught between the gales of the Pacific and the storms of the Arctic.

Mount McKinley (which is called Denali by the Athapaskan Indians) was introduced to mountain climbing during the Klondike gold rush of the turn of [the last] century.

The race for the peak of Mount McKinley was just dramatic enough to match this context.