Denali National Park Trivia
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48 free Denali National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Denali National Park trivia quiz covers the six-million-acre park and preserve in Interior Alaska built around the highest mountain in North America. Questions cover the peak itself (20,310 feet, an 18,000-foot base-to-summit rise, still growing a millimetre a year), the glaciers and permafrost, the wildlife counts of grizzlies, wolves, caribou and Dall sheep, and the strange fact that most visitors never see the mountain at all. History runs from the Athabaskan peoples through Charles Sheldon's 1906 idea, Woodrow Wilson's 1917 signature, the Sourdough expedition's spruce pole, the 1913 first ascent by Stuck, Karstens, Harper and Tatum, Frederick Cook's disputed claim, the 17-year building of the Park Road, the 1967 blizzard disaster, the McKinley-versus-Denali naming saga, Chris McCandless's bus and the Pretty Rocks landslide that has cut the road since 2021. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Alaska and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Denali is the highest mountain on which continent?
North America
Denali, in Alaska, is the highest peak in North America, and it is still rising: the Pacific Plate keeps sliding beneath Alaska, and the collision goes on pushing the range up.
Q 02Which 17,400-foot peak, second-highest in the Alaska Range, rises 14 miles south-west of Denali?
Mount Foraker
Mount Foraker was first climbed in 1934 by Charles Houston's party, who reached the foot of the mountain overland with pack horses.
Q 03What name did Denali National Park carry from 1917 until 1980?
Mount McKinley
The park opened in 1917 as Mount McKinley National Park; the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act merged it with the surrounding national monument and renamed the enlarged unit Denali National Park and Preserve.
Q 04What does the Koyukon Athabaskan name 'Denali' mean?
The high one
In Koyukon Athabaskan the mountain is Deenaalee, 'the high one'; Alaska's geographic names board adopted Denali in 1975, four decades before the federal government did the same.
Q 05Which president's administration restored the name Denali to the mountain for federal use?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama announced the change on the eve of an Alaska visit in 2015, and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell signed the order; a 2025 executive order reversed it for the peak but not the park.
Q 06Which conservation group, co-founded by Theodore Roosevelt, backed Charles Sheldon's campaign for a park around Denali?
Boone and Crockett Club
The Boone and Crockett Club, a society of hunter-conservationists, took up Sheldon's plan; when the bill passed he carried it to the White House himself and was given the pen that signed it.
Q 07Which president signed the 1917 bill creating what is now Denali National Park?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson signed the act on 26 February 1917, but Congress voted no money for the new park until 1921, so for four years it was unfunded and unstaffed.
Q 08Which president stopped at what is now Denali National Park in July 1923?
Warren G. Harding
Warren G. Harding stopped at the park in July 1923 on his way to a ceremony at Nenana; it was his last journey, for he died in San Francisco on 2 August, before he could get home.
Q 09Which judge made the first recorded attempt to climb Denali, in 1903?
James Wickersham
James Wickersham, a district judge, led the first recorded attempt in 1903 and turned back beneath a sheer wall he called impossible to climb; the Wickersham Wall still bears his name.
Q 10Who was the first person to set foot on Denali's summit in 1913?
Walter Harper
Walter Harper, the son of an Irish father and an Athabaskan mother, was first onto the summit; the ranger station where every Denali climber now checks in bears his name.
Q 11Which explorer's 1906 claim to have reached Denali's summit is widely regarded as a hoax?
Frederick Cook
Frederick Cook said he had dashed to the top and back in under two weeks; his 'summit' photograph was later traced to a small outcrop beside the Ruth Glacier, nowhere near the top.
Q 12What did the 1910 'Sourdough' miners carry to the top of Denali's north peak as proof?
A 14-foot spruce pole
Billy Taylor and Pete Anderson hauled a 14-foot spruce pole up the north peak on 3 April 1910 and planted it with a flag; the 1913 party reported seeing it, the best evidence for a climb many had doubted.
Q 13Who pioneered the West Buttress route up Denali in 1951?
Bradford Washburn
Q 21What is the longest glacier in Denali National Park and in the whole Alaska Range?
Kahiltna
The Kahiltna Glacier runs more than 40 miles down the south side of the range; ski-planes land climbers on it, so most Denali expeditions begin on its ice.
Q 22Moist air from which body of water feeds the big glaciers on Denali's southern side?
Gulf of Alaska
The Gulf of Alaska sends moist air north until the range wrings it out as snow, so the southern side gets nearly twice the precipitation and carries the park's longest glaciers.
Q 23Which fruit forms the bulk of a Denali grizzly's diet from late July, when the bears eat almost nonstop?
Blueberries
Bradford Washburn spotted the West Buttress line on an aerial photography flight in 1936 and led its first ascent 15 years later; it is now the standard way up the mountain.
Q 14What killed seven climbers near Denali's summit in July 1967, the mountain's deadliest accident?
A blizzard
A blizzard caught the Wilcox expedition's summit party on the way down from the top; seven of its twelve climbers died, and no accident on Denali has cost more lives.
Q 15In which town must climbers check in with rangers before attempting Denali?
Talkeetna
Every climber checks in at the ranger station in Talkeetna, about 100 miles south of the park entrance; ski-planes then fly parties from its airstrip onto the glacier where the climb begins.
Q 16Which word, borrowed from Russian, names the spruce forest that covers Denali National Park's lowlands?
Taiga
Taiga, the northern forest of spruce and birch, fills Denali's lowlands, but cold soils hold it back: many of its trees never reach full size.
Q 17Why did the Denali Park Road close midway in August 2021?
A landslide accelerated by thawing permafrost
A landslide accelerated by thawing permafrost carried the road away at Pretty Rocks; crews had been dumping up to 100 truckloads of gravel a week to keep it open before they had to give up.
Q 18Why do many visitors to Denali National Park never see the mountain?
Clouds usually hide it
Clouds usually hide it: Denali is big enough to make its own weather, and only about 30 percent of visitors are commonly said to see the peak at all.
Q 19Which photographer made a famous 1940s image of Denali rising above Wonder Lake?
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams never noted when he took his best-known Denali picture, so an astronomer later worked it out to the minute: 3:42 a.m. on 15 July 1948.
Q 20What were Denali National Park's first sled dogs bought to do in 1922?
Patrol against poachers
To patrol against poachers: the first superintendent bought seven dogs to guard the new boundaries, and rangers still run teams from the only working sled-dog kennel in the national parks.
Blueberries, along with soapberries, fuel the late-summer feeding frenzy; in spring and late autumn the same bears dig for the roots of a wild pea instead.
Q 24Which white-coated animal appears on Denali National Park's America the Beautiful quarter?
Dall sheep
A Dall sheep stands before the mountain on the 2012 quarter; it was these wild sheep that drew Charles Sheldon here, and his fear for them drove his campaign to create the park.
Q 25Denali's lynx depend so heavily on which prey that lynx numbers rise and fall with it?
Snowshoe hare
Snowshoe hare numbers boom and crash in cycles, and the lynx follow them: when the hares grow scarce, far fewer lynx kittens are raised.
Q 26Which amphibian, the only one in Denali National Park, survives winter frozen solid?
Wood frog
The wood frog floods its cells with glucose as a natural antifreeze and then freezes solid: all winter it neither breathes nor has a heartbeat, and it thaws back to life in spring.
Q 27In 1992, Christopher McCandless died in an abandoned bus on which trail near Denali National Park?
Stampede
The Stampede Trail drew hundreds of hikers a year to the bus once his story was published; after rescues and two drownings at a river crossing, it was airlifted out in 2020.
Q 28How do the two blocks of land along the Denali Fault move against each other?
Sideways
Sideways: it is a strike-slip fault like California's San Andreas, and in 2002 its two sides slid past each other in a magnitude 7.9 earthquake.
Q 29Fossil tracks in Denali's Cantwell Formation suggest it was once a migration route for which animals?
Dinosaurs crossing between continents
Dinosaurs crossing between continents left the tracks, which hint that Cretaceous Alaska was a highway for animals arriving from Asia; yet nobody found a dinosaur print in the park until 2005.
Q 30What rock forms the core of Denali and explains why it stays so high?
Granite
Granite, cooled from magma deep underground, forms the bulk of Denali; it wears away far more slowly than the softer rocks around it, which is why the peak still towers over its neighbours.