Visitors to Talkeetna take in a view of Denali on the evening of March 9, 2024. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
I spent most of Inauguration Day out skiing the neighborhood trails. As we skied from my driveway to the trail that would take us towards the Nenana River, which forms the eastern boundary of Denali National Park and Preserve, my friends and I talked about the origin of a local name for a section of the road, Karma Ridge. I’ve always understood that the name is an informal and maybe self-conscious reference to the group of hippie transplants who first built there in the 1970s. But as is often true of settler place names, the origin stories are transitory, specifics easily lost.
The neighborhood itself is known as McKinley Village, or, as a few neighbors futilely remind us, McKinley Village View, named for its position overlooking a hotel once (but no longer) called McKinley Village. But speaking to anyone not intimately familiar with the area, “near Denali Park” is how I usually answer the question of where I live. The census designated place called Denali Park includes McKinley Village and others, and roughly includes all in the 10-mile radius I’d call “neighbors.”
Still, the name “McKinley” lingers in the hyper-local. Our community center and volunteer fire department never switched to “Denali,” more a matter of inertia than principle; there are barely enough people to do necessary paperwork for these small community organizations as it is. The name McKinley always seemed to me a quaint anachronism if I thought of it at all, and it’s strange to admit now how little I’ve thought of it.
But in my postski self-allotted 30 minutes of Inauguration Day doom-scrolling (the coming years will be, as many have pointed out, a marathon, not a sprint, and we’ve got to pace ourselves), I skimmed social media responses to the utterly predictable Day 1 executive orders coming out of the White House as the fire department radio check broadcast from the handheld radio on our windowsill. Someone from each Denali Borough fire department chimes in each evening to confirm reception of the dispatcher’s signal from Fairbanks, and when I heard my neighbor say “McKinley copy” over the radio as I read about Trump’s effort to change the official name of Denali back to Mount McKinley, the familiar words hit a bit different.
These last few days, interrogating my own associations with “McKinley,” I’ve arrived at some recognition that, to the degree I feel any attachment to it at all, it’s in the name’s reminder of our own insignificance. The mountain’s name, Denali, carries the legacy of generations of Indigenous stewardship, a name deeply rooted in place, and the surrounding park sharing the name aspires to that depth of history and knowledge. And this half-transient neighborhood of settlers, with its little buildings and fire trucks named after… a guy who never came here long before any of us were born? That’s a name not to take too seriously. It’s a name that keeps one’s self-importance in check.
I’ve been thinking of my first summer at Denali 20 years ago, when the mountain still carried the name McKinley on paper, if not in spirit. I listened to how bus drivers, park rangers, and others tasked with explaining the relationship between the mountain’s two most well-known names to visitors approached the question. I noticed how even those most committed to an apolitical and objective presentation of historical fact sort of trailed off and lost focus when telling the story of how the mountain came to be called McKinley. No one likes to tell an empty story over and over again, or to have to interject the dullest of previous generations’ campaign tactics — like naming a mountain for a presidential candidate — into interpretation of a landscape as stunning and storied as Denali National Park. I started to learn (and am still learning) more about the rich naming traditions “Denali” and other Alaska Native names for the mountain are part of, and came to understand that regardless of what some maps said for a few brief decades, the mountain’s true name had never changed.
I want to believe the flood of Denali photos Alaskans shared in recent days signals a collective commitment to push back against the Trump administration’s equally predictable efforts to treat Alaska as nothing more than a resource colony. The coming years will take a lot more than photos — though looking at photos of Denali, or at the mountain herself, never hurts.
And if you’ve got some lingering affection for the McKinley name, know that there are dedicated volunteer firefighters keeping it alive.
For now.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.