President-elect Donald Trump said he would rename North America’s tallest mountain reversing a change made by former President Obama while he was 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 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 highest mountain peak’s name in 2015 and had it changed to Mount Denali, the name used by Native Americans.
For nearly 100 years before that, it had been known as Mount McKinley since legislation created the national park in 1917.
But Trump has long been making efforts to reverse some of the work of Obama since taking office the first time, and it looks like he will continue to try and undo it when he returns to office next year for a second term.
According to the National Park Service, the controversy surrounding the mountain’s name started well before it even became a national park.
In 1916, naturalist Charles Sheldon made an appeal to the Alaska Engineering Commission about the naming of the park, stating that he hoped it would be named Mt Denali National Park.
Denali had been the name used by Native Americans in the region for over a century which translates to ‘the high one’ or ‘great one.’
In the late 1800s, prospectors started referring to it as ‘Densmore Mountain’ after a gold prospector named Frank Densmore, and eventually a gold prospector named William Dickey used the name ‘Mount McKinley’ in an 1897 article despite the new president-elect having no connection to Alaska.
The name Mount McKinley ended up sticking and became popular after the president was assassinated in 1901.
But in 1975, the name controversy was reignited when Alaska petitioned the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (USBGN) to return the name of the mountain to Denali officially.
Alaska politicians led several efforts to have the name changed, but they were blocked in Congress as lawmakers from McKinley’s home state of Ohio pushed back.
In a compromise struck in 1980, the national park surrounding the mountain was renamed Denali National Park and Preserve, but the mountain continued to be called Mount McKinley.
But in 2015, then-President Obama with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell took executive action to officially rename the continent’s tallest peak Mount Denali.
It came just ahead of the centennial of the national park.
The move was cheered on by Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski who had pushed for the change with legislation in Congress.
She slammed Trump comments about the planned name change in a post on X late Sunday.
‘There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali – the Great One,’ she wrote.
