The Full Mounty

The "Real" Snow-Shrouded High One

Mount Denali (NO, not McKinley), 20,310 ft., Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska

Sometimes, you just need to rest your ears, eyes, heart and soul from what James Bruno calls the “psychosis, dementia and physical decline [that] have turned the nation into the world’s largest insane asylum.” For me and my partner, it was a true ‘North by Northwest’ escape on a boat sailing from Vancouver up through the Salish Sea and Queen Charlotte Strait, past Prince of Wales island to Juneau and Skagway, then into Canada along the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush Trail via the narrow gauge railroad at White Pass to Whitehorse and Dawson City, exploring the desolate wilderness of the Yukon Territory along the way, with its just-budding fireweed, tufts of willow and emerging, lemon-yellow spruce tips, before venturing back to Alaska’s interior.

Leaving You Know Who and his rotten brain behind, we abandoned Washington for laughter, nature, black spruce, caribou, bears, ptarmigans and…Mount Denali, the highest peak in North America. 51 years ago, the Alaska state legislature formally requested the federal government to change the name of this great mountain back to its original Koyukon-Athabaskan name of Denali, the High One. (In 1896, white nationalists, ignoring the fact that the mountain already had a name, renamed it McKinley for a Republican President who had annexed the Kingdom of Hawaii after deposing Queen Liliuokalani in 1893, and — through a “splendid little war” — took possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from the Spanish in 1898.) Not even the Russians had tried to name it for a man nobody had ever heard of, using simply the Athabaskan title in translation (Большая Гора — Big Mountain). When Ohioan William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, the Ohio Congressional delegation took it as a sign from God that this mountain must be named for him in perpetuity. Significantly, in 1975, when the Alaska State Legislature formally requested Denali’s heritage be returned, only the Ohio Congressional delegation objected.

Finally, Obama’s Interior Secretary Sally Jewel complied with Alaska’s request in 2015, changing the name back to Denali on all official documents —- until January 2025, that is, when Velveeta Voldemort decided to celebrate the Social Darwinism of the late 1800s and its accompanying beggar-thy-neighbor tariffs, which McKinley had championed. Nobody had asked for the name change, nobody demanded it, nobody had even thought about it — and the entire Alaska Congressional delegation vociferously objected. But Pissy Pants thought changing it back to McKinley would cement his own ‘victimized’ presidency, which demands that snit fits based on delusion always be accepted as reality. Still, Denali it officially remains in Alaska — and within anybody with a shred of sense and respect.

It is said Denali shrouds himself from view. Those who get to see it without clouds are informally branded 7 percenters, for the chance of that actually happening. We got to see it clear as a bell — three days in a row. I do not know what the chances of that are in any season, but seeing this magnificent massif looming above the mountains below it moved us greatly. Climbers die on Denali — it is as treacherous as Everest, and 4 people have already lost their lives in the effort this post-Memorial Day season, which made the viewing of the mountain, his wife and child (the two adjoining peaks) even more poignant.

To say Alaska is a state filled with superlatives is an understatement. Turn around and there’s yet another breathtaking mountain range. Blink your eyes, and another spectacular river, waterfall, rainforest, or field of black spruce, nesting sandhill cranes, bald eagles, grizzlies, and a vastness difficult to put in words rushes by. You just have to see it for yourself. Or go see some place — anyplace — that makes you feel in the presence of true greatness, beauty, the cycles of nature, with the proper sense of humility that must accompany it.

View from the Alaska Railroad, Fairbanks south to Anchorage, somewhere past Talkeetna.

And Canada. Fun, bright, cheeky, unfailingly polite Canada. We plotted how two gay guys might be accepted as escaping political refugees, flinging ourselves on the mercy of the Mounties — though in honesty, we would prefer living in Vancouver and visiting the interior wildness, rather than homesteading in Nova Scotia (for those younger and up to the challenge). So we leave you with a joyful Canadian spirit to remind ourselves — and you — that other lands exist which somehow co-exist far better with other countries, with nature, with ‘First Nations’ antecedents and ancestors, with themselves. A little ditty, courtesy of the Canadian folk trio Arrogant Worms, celebrating what the True North Strong and Free brings to the rest of the world (other than peace, order and good government). 🇨🇦 Enjoy…..