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The Other Denali Controversy: How America's Tallest Mountain Got Shorter

When Mt. McKinley officially went back to being Denali, it also got a height reduction.
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The highest point in North America is always something to see, but it doesn't usually make headlines the way it did last month, when President Obama officially changed the name of Alaska's Mt. McKinley to Denali. The very next day, the headlines got stranger: The United States Geological Survey announced that they were chopping ten feet off of Denali's official height. Wait, what? How does a mountain lose weight? Here are some fun facts you should know:

Mt. McKinley has actually been "Denali" for forty years.First of all, a reality check for your aunt sending you Facebook memes about how Denaliis a Kenyan swear word, or something: Alaska renamed Mt. McKinley Denali in 1975 to honor the traditional Athabascan name for the mountain, which means "the high one." At the time, the Alaskan legislature asked the United States Board on Geographic Names to do the same.

The Buckeye State remembers!One Ohio congressman didn't like the idea of Ohio-born president William McKinley losing by far his most prominent monument. So for decades, Representative Ralph Regula attached a renunciation of the "Denali" name switch as a rider to appropriations bills funding the Interior Department. The Board on Geographic Names was powerless to act as long as the matter was pending in Congress. It wasn't until 2015 that the Obama administration made the change official. The move had bipartisan support in Alaska, but Ohio is still peeved.

Mt. McKinley was slightly higher than Denali.Mt. McKinley's official height had been 20,320 feet since the 1950s, when surveyors took that measurement the old-fashioned way: tilting an instrument called a theodolite up to look at the peak, and then measuring the angle that tilt formed with the horizon. That's right: just a few decades ago, mountains were measured with, essentially, a giant protractor and ninth-grade trigonometry. But in June, a team of climbers ascended the peak armed with the next generation of equipment: GPS. After a lot of sophisticated math to take into account variables like snow pack and the best sea-level baseline at that latitude, the team announced that the old measurement was ten feet too high. Denali is going to need a lot of new altitude signs.

Mt. Everest's height was a deliberate lie for a century.Denali isn't the only mountain whose height has changed. The first British survey of India in 1852 discovered that Everest was the highest mountain in the world, with a height of exactly 29,000 feet. That number seemed suspiciously even, so Surveyor General Andrew Waugh announced the height as 29,002 feet. But Waugh needn't have bothered, since more recent surveys have given Everest's actual height as 29,029 feet. Last year's Nepal earthquake may have taken an inch or so off that height but, in general, plate tectonics are pushing Everest a little higher every year. Denali is also growing slowly, so in about 3,000 years or so, we should once again have a 20,320-foot Denali. Unless William McKinley's vengeful ghost finds some way to destroy it first.