Bair Tours

Denali National Park

Denali National Park is a bucket list dream destination for many shutterbug enthusiasts in order to get the ultimate shot of Mount McKinley. We’ll drive through Wassilla, Nancy Lake, Willow and Talkeetna on the way here. Denali photo dreams can easily get broken with rain and fog if you only have a day or two here. If the weather looks poor for pictures on your reserved tour with us we will take a guest vote to upgrade our destination to Seward instead. If it’s a tie then I will break it with my vote.

Interesting History

Denali National Park and Preserve, formerly known as Mount McKinley National Park, is an American national park and preserve located in Interior Alaska, centered on Denali, the highest mountain in North America. The park and contiguous preserve encompass 6,045,153 acres (9,446 sq mi) which is larger than the state of New Hampshire. On December 2, 1980, 2,146,580-acre (3,354 sq mi) Denali 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 glacier, snow, and bare rock at the highest elevations. The longest glacier is the KahiltnaGlacier. Wintertime activities include dog sledding, cross-country skiing, and snowmobiling. The park received 594,660 recreational visitors in 2018.

Human habitation in the Denali Region extends to more than 11,000 years before the present, with documented sites just outside park boundaries dated to more than 8,000 years before present. However, relatively few archaeological sites have been documented within the park boundaries, owing to the region’s high elevation, with harsh winter conditions and scarce resources compared to lower elevations in the area. 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.

In 1906, conservationist Charles Alexander Sheldon conceived the idea of preserving the Denali region as a national park. In October 1915, Sheldon took up the matter with Dr. E. W. Nelson of the Biological Survey at Washington, D.C. and with George Bird Grinnell, with a purpose to introduce a suitable bill in the coming session of Congress. On December 3, 1915, the plan was presented to Alaska’s delegate, James Wickersham, who after some deliberation gave his approval. The plan then went to the Executive Committee of the Boone and Crockett Club and, on December 15, 1915, it 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 over the following year, and on February 19, 1917, the bill passed. On February 26, 1917, 11 years from its conception, the bill was signed in legislation by the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, thereby creating Mount McKinley National Park.

The name of Mount McKinley National Park was subject to local criticism from the beginning of the park. The word Denali means “the high one” in the native Athabaskan language and refers to the mountain itself. The mountain was named after 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 into effect in 1917. 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 name of the mountain to Denali. However, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names did not recognize the change and continued to denote the official name as Mount McKinley. This situation lasted until Aug. 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” time period.