Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, September 2015, after more than 100 years of being officially named by the federal

government Mount McKinley, Alaska's tallest peak was renamed

Denali. The paperwork was signed by Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who did it right in time

to time it for a visit to Alaska by President Barack Obama. This was after decades and decades

of debate and conversation about renaming the mountain, not for a president from Ohio, but instead

for its traditional Ku Yucon name. So let's talk about the politics that went into the name change

of the tallest mountain in North America, and of course the politics that went into naming it back

for McKinley just this year by the Trump administration. Here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbup and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. So let me give a little background on, well, first off, I guess we should get this out of the way. Have any of us climbed Denali? No? That's a no? Absolutely not. I actually haven't been to Alaska. Am I the only one who hasn't been? No, I haven't been either. It's on my bucket list, definitely. I have, and semi-notoriously got lost on the side of a mountain in Alaska, but it was not Denali. And as much as I like climbing, and I've climbed some of the other big, big mountains out there, this seems very daunting. It's very tall. It's very tall. And in fact, it is. Let me pull up my Denali facts. It is 20,310 feet tall. So not the tallest mountain in the world, but it is considered one of the hardest to climb. And it is kind of on that list of the seven summits, and it's the third tallest of those.

And it has two peaks.

South Summit, North Summit.

The South Summit is the one that climbers aim for because that is the true peak.

The first verified ascent was in 1913 on a team led by a man named Hudson Stuck,

which is just, if you're going to invent Explorer in 1913, you call them Hudson Stuck.

That's great.

Fantastic name.

Great name.

And at that time, it was not called Mount McKinley. And it was, you know, its traditional name is Denali, Denali's various spellings, you know,

the local languages and indigenous groups, the Yukon, the Tanana, the Kukoskwim, and, you know, I looked up some of the translations for what this traditional names mean, and it's basically the tall one or the big mountain, which is a good name, you know? Great name. What mountain are you talking about? Oh, I'm talking about the tall one. You look around. There it is. Everyone knows exactly what you're talking about. Very self-explanatory. Yet somehow the tall one turns into Mount McKinley of all people. How does that happen? Oh my gosh. This is the craziest story as to how you get a name for a mountain.

So there is a guy by the name of William Dickey, who is climbing the mountain in 1896.

And he actually is born in New Hampshire, but he's a Seattleite.

And as he's climbing this mountain, he gets news that William McKinley of Ohio is running for the presidency,

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