Denali is the tallest mountain in North America at 6,190 metres. That’s a lot shorter than Everest. But Everest sits on the high Tibetan plateau, so it only rises about 3,700 metres above the ground around it. Denali, by contrast, rises around 5,500 metres straight out of low Alaskan tundra.
That massive vertical jump makes Denali look stupendously huge from below. It also makes it horribly cold - the peak holds the record for the coldest mountain temperatures ever recorded outside the polar regions.
Denali’s name means “the high one” in the local Koyukon language. For about a century the U.S. called it Mount McKinley, after a president who never visited it, before changing the official name back to Denali in 2015.
