Trump to give America’s tallest mountain new name

President-elect Donald Trump said he would rename North America’s highest mountain, reversing a change made by former President Obama during his time in office.

Speaking at a conservative TurningPoints USA conference in Phoenix, the 78-year-old said he would rename Alaska’s Mount Denali to Mount McKinley, after the 25th president.

“They took his name off Mount McKinley,” Trump told his supporters on Sunday.

He praised McKinley as a “great president” and said his administration would bring back the name Mount McKinley “because I think he deserves it.”

It comes after Obama sided with the state of Alaska in the long-running dispute over the name of the highest mountain peak in 2015 and had it changed to Mount Denali, the name used by Native Americans.

Nearly 100 years earlier, it was known as Mount McKinley since legislation created the national park in 1917.

But Trump has long been attempting to reverse some of Obama’s work since he first came to power, and it appears he will continue to try to undo this when he returns to power next year comes for a second term.

According to the National Park Service, the controversy surrounding the mountain’s name began long before it even became a national park.

In 1916, naturalist Charles Sheldon appealed to the Alaska Engineering Commission about the naming of the park, stating that he hoped it would be named Mt Denali National Park.

Denali was the name used by Native Americans in the region for more than a century, which translates to “the high” or “great.”

In the late 19th century, prospectors began calling it “Densmore Mountain” after a prospector named Frank Densmore, and eventually a prospector named William Dickey used the name “Mount McKinley” in an 1897 article, despite the newly elected president no connection to Alaska.

The name Mount McKinley stuck and became popular after the president was assassinated in 1901.

But in 1975, the controversy over the name flared up again when Alaska petitioned the US Board on Geographic Names (USBGN) to officially return the mountain’s name to Denali.

President Obama used executive authority to revert the native Alaskan name Mount Denali to Mount McKinley in 2015 after a long-running naming dispute. Mount Denali is the highest mountain in North America

Former President Obama during a hike in Alaska on September 1, 2015. He made the trip to raise awareness of the threat of climate change after announcing that North America’s highest point would be renamed Mount Denali

Alaskan politicians led several efforts to change the name, but these were blocked in Congress when lawmakers from McKinley’s home state of Ohio withdrew.

In a compromise reached in 1980, the national park surrounding the mountain was renamed Denali National Park and Preserve, but the mountain remained called Mount McKinley.

But in 2015, then-President Obama along with Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell took executive action to officially name the continent’s tallest mountain Mount Denali.

It came just before the national park’s centennial.

The move was applauded by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who had pushed for the change with legislation in Congress.

She denounced Trump’s comments about the planned name change in a post on X late Sunday.

“There is only one name worthy of North America’s highest mountain: Denali – the Great,” she wrote.