{"id":9467,"date":"2011-09-13T01:20:20","date_gmt":"2011-09-13T08:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cruisingdoneright.com\/?p=9467"},"modified":"2011-09-13T01:20:20","modified_gmt":"2011-09-13T08:20:20","slug":"9467","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/?p=9467","title":{"rendered":"McKinley: The Mountain Comes Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>ALASKA \u2014 It’s been sitting there for 4,000 years or so, since the last Ice Age. It doesn’t move, except for a jiggle here and there from the 800 or so earthquakes there are in Alaska every year. At 20,320 feet, it is the highest mountain in North America.<\/p>\n

Yet Mount McKinley is treated as something that lives and breathes.<\/p>\n

“We’re 40 miles from the mountain,” said the bus driver taking us from one strategically situated Princess<\/a> Wilderness Lodge (McKinley<\/a>) to another (Denali<\/a>). “Hopefully, it’s out.”<\/p>\n

And if it’s not, then is the mountain in? The references to the “coming out” of the mountain are constant in exchanges between tour guides and tourists. Since there’s no closet that big, we surmise that it “comes out” of the clouds. Yet it’s as if the mountain is moving, not the clouds.<\/p>\n

On a lucky day, like the day we landed in Alaska<\/a> to begin a two-week adventure ending with a cruise on the Coral Princess<\/a>, it can be seen from Anchorage<\/a>, more than 300 miles away. If you arrive on one of the 360 days a year when that doesn’t happen, you can see it from the Denali State Park<\/a>, or the Denali National Park, or somewhere in between, or not at all. Even going “flightseeing” doesn’t guarantee anything more than a glimpse of the summit.<\/p>\n

Yet apparently it’s not the clouds that make the decision, it’s the mountain. Or as another bus driver put it: “It’s not where we are, it’s what the mountain is doing.”<\/p>\n

Nobody knows when or for how long the mountain will come out to play, or to be the most-photographed item in Alaska. In the heart of the 600-mile-long Alaska Range that slices across the state, east to west, Mount McKinley is as close to the sub-Arctic as most of us ever want to be. Despite its peak-a-boo nature, it is hard to miss entirely \u2014 the base is five miles wide.<\/p>\n

It is a mountain of at least two names. More than a century ago, a gold prospector named it to recognize U.S. President William McKinley, allegedly when he was still just a candidate who supported the gold community. McKinley was assassinated in 2001 and didn’t see Alaska, never mind his mountain, and attempts to restore its original name \u2014 Denali \u2014 have been blocked in Congress by delegations from Ohio, McKinley’s home state.<\/p>\n

That notwithstanding, while people in the lower 48 and Hawaii may know it as Mount McKinley, to Alaskans it is simply Denali. A word that is native Athabaskan, it has been translated into several names that mean the same. The Big One. The Tall One. Big Guy. The High One. The Great One.<\/p>\n

Or just…The Mountain.<\/p>\n

The one that “comes out.”<\/p>\n

Tomorrow: Landing on Mount McKinley…and for more on our trip to Alaska, see Phil Reimer’s blog at Ports and Bows<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ALASKA \u2014 It’s been sitting there for 4,000 years or so, since the last Ice Age. It doesn’t move, except for a jiggle here and there from the 800 or so earthquakes there are in Alaska every year. At 20,320 feet, it is the highest mountain in North America. Yet Mount McKinley is treated as… Continue reading McKinley: The Mountain Comes Out<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,36,15],"tags":[45,343,712,713,26,27,64,708],"class_list":["post-9467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-reviews","category-stories","tag-alaska","tag-coral-princess","tag-denali","tag-mount-mckinley","tag-phil-reimer","tag-ports-and-bows","tag-princess-cruise","tag-princess-cruisetours","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9467\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}