Mount Denali is the highest peak in all of North America. Craggy and covered in snow, this mountain rises more than 6190 feet above sea level, rising from the vast valleys of Denali National Park in Alaska. The mountain was once known as Mount McKinley, but after many decades of controversy, in 2016, it was officially renamed Denali, a name long used by the Native population.When Anatoli Boukreev, a formidable Kazakh mountaineer who died prematurely on Annapurna at Christmas 1997, decided in 1990 to take the Alaska route where Denali is located, he didn’t expect it to be so immense. He first arrived in Anchorage, the state’s largest city, and then moved to Talkeetna, a town of just under 900 inhabitants that had always been used as a base for expeditions to the mountain. Boukreev arrived in Alaska in May, and after a brief acclimatization, set off for the summit. After only ten and a half hours he was at the summit. The Denali National Park rangers were astonished. None of them had ever witnessed such a feat. Quick, clean, precise. "It’s unreal what Boukreev has done," they said in chorus. And yet, for the Kazakh, it was not a walk in the park. On the contrary. Because Denali can be much more extreme than Everest, as the American Alpine Club (AAC) reminds us several times in its publications. Both for the proximity to the Arctic Circle and for the fact of being in the middle of nowhere. There is no GSM phone reception, and even if there were, help would be delayed. It is therefore necessary to rely on a satellite phone (only the Iridium network works) and an adequate physical preparation to face the ascent along the slopes of this mountain that from below seems endless.
Denali is the third most prominent peak on the planet, after Everest and Aconcagua. It is 6,190 metres high, but that is not what scares mountaineers. No. It’s the more than 5,500 feet that separate the base from the summit. 18,000 feet, as the Americans put it, that are consistently windswept, because the Denali massif is also the third most isolated mountain in the world.
