On Monday, January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump to rename Alaska’s 20,310-foot Denali, the highest peak in North America. The mountain’s name will revert to Mount McKinley, named for William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, who was assassinated on September 14, 1901.

The decree undoes the work of former President Barack Obama, who, in 2015 officially changed the name from Mount McKinley to Denali, the peak’s traditional name from the Koyukon Athabascan language, which is spoken by Alaska’s Native inhabitants. Denali translates as “the high one” or “the great one.”

The name change will take effect within 30 days. The name of Denali National Park and Preserve, where the mountain sits, will not change.

Policy wonks (and ) know that there has been infighting in Congress about the name of North America’s highest peak since at least 1975. That was the first year the state of Alaska petitioned to use the local name Denali instead of McKinley. Lawmakers from Ohio, McKinley’s home state, pushed back.

But how do the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the mountain feel about Denali’s name change? We asked some of Denali’s, er McKinley’s, most prominent athletes, guides, and rangers.

Why Alaskans Prefer the Name Denali

The guides and mountaineers who spoke to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű for this story expressed dismay at the name change.

“It’s worth mentioning that the President suggested doing this about six years ago,” says Mark Westman, an Alaska resident and former ranger on the mountain. “And he was told by Alaska’s two senators—both of whom are Republicans and both who are still the current senators—not to do that.”

Indeed, on Monday, January 21, Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, : “Our nation’s tallest mountain, which has been called Denali for thousands of years, must continue to be known by the rightful name bestowed by Alaska Koyukon Athabascans, who have stewarded the land since time immemorial.”

Guides and climbers echoed Murkowski’s sentiment—the importance of the name Denali lies in its connection to Alaska’s precolonial history, they said.

“The name Denali reflects a local cultural heritage here that predates the United States,” Westman says. “The name McKinley was an arbitrary name given for someone who had never even set foot here. He was from Ohio.”

Conrad Anker, who began climbing in the Alaska Range in 1987, said he was overjoyed when the peak’s Indigenous name was officially restored in 2015. Changing the name back, he said, makes no sense to outdoor enthusiasts, local Alaskans, or the region’s Indigenous population.

“It was fitting to honor the people of Alaska with the rightful name,” he said. “I think it’s worth noting that the vast majority of peaks in the Himalayas have local names.”

Guide Melissa Arnot Reid, the first American woman to ascend and descend Everest without supplemental oxygen, said that precolonial names such as Denali enhance a visitor’s connection to a place. That’s why she encourages her climbing clients to refer to peaks and regions by traditional names.

“Discovering what the local people call a place, and why, enhances our connection to that place,” she says.

Does Anyone Even Use the Name Mount McKinley?

Even before the 2015 name change, climbers and guides frequently used the peak’s Native name, guides told us. Westman, who first came to the peak in 1994, said that while the names were used interchangeably by locals back then, the preference was to call it Denali.

“There’s been a difference in the name Denali for, well, forever,” he said. “Native Alaskans were calling it Denali for thousands of years before anybody else came here. In the climbing community, it’s almost universal—I almost never hear anybody call it McKinley.”

In the days following the announcement, many Alaskan residents appear to agree. On Tuesday, January 21, the group asked 1,816 adults in Alaska about the proposed name change. The survey found that 54 percent opposed it, while just 26 percent supported the change.

Ski mountaineer Kit DesLauriers, the first person to hike and then ski the Seven Summits, pointed out that even Alaska’s political leaders have used the name Denali publicly for decades. “With Denali, the traditional name has been the choice not only of Alaskan Native people, but also of the entire state including its political leadership since at least 1975,” she says.

Dave Hahn of RMI Mountain Guides, who has ascended the peak 25 times, said that the mountain is “big enough to handle however many names you want to throw at it.”

But he stressed that Denali felt like it was always the appropriate title within the climbing community. “I never felt that McKinley was wrong—it honored a president that was assassinated while in office,” he said. “But I think that Denali is truer to where the mountain is, and who the people around the mountain are, recognizing that it’s an Alaskan mountain and not a Washington D.C. mountain.”

Most People Will Still Say Denali

The sources who spoke to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű for this story agreed on one thing: they will continue to call the peak by its Native name going forward.

“I intend to continue to refer to the great mountain as Denali for as long as I’m alive, and I encourage every other climber to do the same,” wrote author Jon Krakauer in an email. “Trump might be able to officially rename it, but he will never be able to force me to call it anything except Denali.”

Ultrarunner Jack Kuenzle, who in 2023 set the fastest known time for ascending the peak, echoed the sentiment.

“I can’t imagine anybody will be actually utilizing McKinley,” he said. “I’ve never heard it called that.”

Keith Sidle, who teaches mountaineering courses with the Alaska Mountaineering School, said the only thing he expects to see change is how the mountain is named on maps and signs. Sidle said his climbing buddies are already saying online that they will continue to use the Native name.

“It’s changing a name on a piece of paper, it’s not changing the mountain,” he said. “To the people that it really matters to, it’s not changing anything.”

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On November 14, Jenni Lowe, president of the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation (ALCF) and widow of climbing legend Alex Lowe, announced that the nonprofit she founded in his name will officially dissolve before the end of 2025. The nonprofit’s assets—including the iconic Khumbu Climbing Center—will go to the Juniper Fund, a Nepal-based charity helmed by celebrity mountaineers Melissa Arnot Reid and David Morton. Jenni Lowe first initiated the handoff process about a year ago.

“It just felt like time,” she told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “I’m approaching 70 years old, and I feel as though I’m ready to change direction in my life.”

The ACLF has been a force of change in the Khumbu region of Nepal since its founding 25 years ago. Jenni Lowe initially launched the ALCF alongside leading alpinist Conrad Anker to help indigenous mountain communities and to honor her late husband, Alex Lowe, after he was killed in an avalanche on Shishapangma in 1999. At the time, Alex Lowe was considered one of the best alpinists of his generation, establishing bold first ascents in Antarctica, Baffin Island, and in the Himalaya. He was only 40 when he died, and he left three young sons behind.

The cornerstone of the ALCF’s work was The Khumbu Climbing Center, a facility that helps provide safety education to Sherpa guides and other members of indigenous climbing community. Together with Anker, Jenni Lowe helped build the KCC from the ground up. Since its launch in 2003, the facility has provided life-saving training to hundreds of climbers.

From here on out, the KCC will continue under the umbrella of the Juniper Fund, a well-regarded nonprofit that has worked alongside the ALCF for more than a decade. The Juniper Fund’s mission to support the families of Himalayan high-altitude workers, especially those grieving loved ones killed in the mountains, dovetails with that of the ALCF. That made the hand-off an easy decision, Lowe told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

“The Juniper Fund does amazing work,” Lowe said. “When I started the ALCF, I was this young widow, and I had deep compassion for the women over there who I saw as in my shoes. The Juniper Fund stepped in to provide support to those families in a beautiful way.”

Lowe hopes the transfer of assets from the ALCF to the Juniper Fund will be complete by the end of 2025. That includes all monetary assets, the building that houses the KCC, and other resources. The ALCF’s board of directors will continue to be involved throughout this process, Lowe said.

Arnot Reid described the transfer as an opportunity to build on the Juniper Fund’s existing mission. But, she said, it’s important to emphasize that the KCC isn’t getting passed off, per se; it’s a powerful organization in its own right, and it’s simply getting a new financial backer.

“The KCC is run in Nepal by Nepalis, and it’s an incredibly successful and really well-run organization,” Arnot Reid said. “They don’t need our intervention to run the incredible programs they already have; they just need our support financially and awareness-wise to continue to bring their mission to people who aren’t aware of it.”

Arnot Reid said the Juniper fund is committed to supporting the KCC’s existing work and has no plans to alter or add to it at this time. Instead, the Juniper fund will work closely with the organization’s Nepali representatives and follow their lead.

But while the work will remain the same, Arnot Reid says Jenni Lowe’s leadership will certainly be missed.

“Jenni is a role model for me,” Arnot Reid said. “She worked really hard to make things happen in a space where people said it wasn’t possible, or ‘We can’t do that,’ and she did it with grit.”

That’s something Lowe is equally proud of: she said in her time at ALCF, the nonprofit accomplished more than she could have ever dreamed of.

“In the beginning, it was just a way for me to walk through the grief of losing Alex. I had no idea what I was getting into when I first started the foundation, but it was a huge gift to my life,” Lowe told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “I love that community and I’ll miss them. But I feel satisfied and happy with what we’ve done. It’s time to make my world a little smaller.”

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Jessie Diggins’ life revolves around snow. She is, after all, the most decorated Nordic skier in U.S. history. But recently, it’s not the snow itself that’s top of mind for her; it’s the lack of it. Losing winter as we know it—along with the other environmental ravages of climate change and a warming globe—has become one of her biggest sources of worry and motivation.

“I want my grandkids someday to have the opportunity to learn cross-country skiing,” Diggins told OBJ. “Maybe they like it, and maybe they don’t. But at least I want them to get the chance to experience winter the way we knew it growing up.”

Earlier this year, that wish brought the three-time Olympic medal winner to Capitol Hill to lobby for a wonky-sounding bill that could help : the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which finally became law on August 16.

She’s not the only pro athlete getting involved in politics. Environmental concerns also brought Tommy Caldwell, one of the planet’s best rock climbers, and Colorado senator John Hickenlooper together for a climb last fall, so that Caldwell could bend the senator’s ear about his climate concerns. Mountaineer Conrad Anker has paid repeated visits to the offices of Montana senators Jon Tester and Steve Daines for the same reason. And pioneering climber Phil Henderson, the leader of the first all-Black American team to summit Everest, is out pounding the pavement, encouraging his community to , when he’s not making sports history.

As athlete activism , some fans are for folks like Diggins, Caldwell, Anker, and Henderson to stay in their lanes and quiet down. Whatever the haters may say, their efforts are working. The four athletes, working with nonprofit , were among the many voices that helped move the IRA over the finish line. The law tackles health care costs, tax codes, and pollution in historically marginalized communities, and also contains the largest climate investment in U.S. history.

“This puts us on a path for energy security in the 21st century,” said Mario Molina, POW’s executive director. “It will also help us reach our commitment under the Paris Agreement of 40 percent greenhouse-gas emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.”

But the fight isn’t over.

A little over a week after President Biden signed the bill into law, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Business Journal sat down with these four athletes, along with Molina of POW, to ask what the legislation means to them, their careers, and the broader outdoor community—and what still needs to be done to ensure a safe future for our planet. The below conversation has been edited for clarity.

Of all the ways you could spend your time, why advocate for climate-change legislation and the Inflation Reduction Act? 

Jessie Diggins: It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge fan of fresh powder or you’re into fly fishing or trail running, we’re all invested in some way in being outdoors, breathing clean air, enjoying the amazing environment, and protecting our crazy-cool outdoor playgrounds.

Tommy Caldwell: I don’t like politics, and I don’t really like the idea of lobbying. But I do understand that policy is our quickest way to make a change. At the very least, I want to slow down climate change so we can extend the health and wellbeing of our children and our children’s children. This is really about future generations.

And will this law actually protect our planet, in your view? Or at least help?

Mario Molina: Under a business-as-usual scenario, where we don’t do anything at all, we are on a trajectory to reach warming of 3.5 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Everything that we’re experiencing now—the heatwave that we just had, the increase in hurricanes, floods, reduced snowpack, the unreliability of winter, droughts and fires out West—is the consequence of about 1.2 degrees.

Say you’re mountain biking down a 40-degree slope and you see a cement wall in front of you. When is it too late to hit the brakes? Do you want to hit that at 50 miles per hour? Or do you want to hit it at 25 miles per hour? We are going to continue to see the impact [of climate change], but there is a scenario in which those impacts are manageable, and we were able to protect some semblance of seasonality.

What has that 1.2-degree warming, and the resulting climate changes, looked like for you on trails and mountains over the course of your careers?

JD: A couple of years back, we started our World Cup season with the pre-camp in Finland in Rovaniemi, which is right on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Even there, the trails had completely melted out, they were full of rocks and dirt and puddles, and it was down to a very thin layer of man-made snow. We would jog home after skiing these small loops on this dirty snow, and there would be little flowers and green moss and plants blooming on the side of the trail—in November! In the Arctic Circle! For me, that was just really shocking. It brings it home that nowhere is safe.

Phil Henderson: The biggest example I can give is from Mount Kenya in 2000, where I spent a lot of time, and where there are permanent ice fields. The route to one of the higher peaks is easy [Editor’s note: easy for you, Phil]. I went back in 2010, and that ice was gone, those permanent ice fields were pretty much gone.

Similar story: I went to Kilimanjaro in 2000, and then back in 2018, and again what you see is shrinking glaciers, ice that’s not there anymore. So I’ve seen it with my eyes in places that most people will never see. But others see it in their cities, in the urban areas: winter coming later, the snowpack being far more shallow, no runoff in the rivers.

Tommy Caldwell: I started noticing the glacier changes in the mountains—that’s really obvious. As glaciers melt out, the mountains are thawing and starting to fall down in certain places. Beyond that, the two places where I spend most of my time, Colorado and Yosemite, are drastically changed because of forest fires. Once, the summertime was an incredible climbing season; now a lot of the time we’re stuck inside because of the air quality.

What do you mean by that? Mountains are actually falling down?

TC: Ice is melting out of the cracks. I first started to notice it in Patagonia. Mountains melted and moved, and that created , but also just completely sporadic rockfall, whole sides of the mountain.

Conrad Anker: The original ascent route of The Ogre [in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range] is completely melted out. It’s not climbable from a safety parameter. Think of it like this. If you’ve ever scraped ice off in your driveway on a cold day, it’s completely stuck there. You chip so hard, you end up breaking the concrete. If you’re an ice climber, you want those conditions. But then on a warm day, when there’s a bed of water underneath it—which is what happened this year in the Marmolada Glacier Collapse [in the Dolomites]—that’s when things move.

So while this bill likely won’t stop some of those changes, it sounds like it could help them from getting worse. Where does it fall short? 

MM: We would have loved not to see oil leases included in the bill. The International Energy Agency has said pretty emphatically that in order to reach the 1.5-degree Paris target, there can’t be any new fossil fuel development.

Now, having said that, rarely in politics do you get something done that doesn’t get criticism from both sides. If you’re getting criticism from both sides, you’ve probably struck somewhere in the middle of the best you could get.

What are some of the tangible, immediate benefits of the climate portions of the bill?

CA: Near-term, if we have more solar panels and wind towers, those two industries hire from the climbing community. They put advertisements in the magazines that talk to those people; they actively recruit within them. So there’s going to be more climbers working on towers and using their skills. We’re going to create jobs. Here in Montana, we’re a coal state but have a tremendous amount of wind and solar potential. The law will put people to work.

TC: I moved into a new house a few years ago and I’ve been debating putting solar on—I’ll admit, it does seem a little bit expensive. This [the bill’s Residential Clean Energy Credit, which allows homeowners to subtract 30 percent of solar costs from their federal taxes through 2032] just moves the needle to a place that makes it a no-brainer. If that can happen for me, on my house, it can happen for other people.

What’s next then? Where do we go from here?

MM: The work that’s left won’t be done in our lifetime. That’s something we have to recognize. But this is a massive quantum leap. Number one is clean-energy permitting and number two is interconnection and transmission [of that energy]. We have to make permitting far more effective, far more efficient. After that, the focus is grid upgrades.

What can we do as people who love the outdoors?

JD: . And not just every four years. Vote this fall [in the midterms]. We’ve seen history made in the margins of elections, in the smallest numbers you can imagine. That can actually make a big swing and change the course of what will happen and what laws are able to be passed.

PH: Look at your daily life, and minimize as much energy use as you possibly can. If you can use solar, switch to solar. If you can drive an electric car, drive an electric car. If you can ride a bike, ride a bike. If you can walk, walk. We just have to really change our way of thinking and living on a day-to-day basis.

Even with everything you’ve seen—ski trails melting, mountains crumbling—do you feel hopeful?

TC: It’s amazing how my mood can go from feeling pretty discouraged to feeling very hopeful just based on this one bill. Once this version of the bill finally passed, I did find myself filled with hope.

JD: We need to remember that we’re not at the end of the race yet—and this is a very, very long race. But I think it’s important to celebrate where we are right now, and then to keep looking forward, using our voices, and not taking for granted how amazing the outdoors are. Every time I get out to ski, I have to remind myself how incredible that opportunity is, and that we have to fight to protect it. It’s when we start taking things for granted that we’re most at risk of losing them.

Editor’s note: Protect Our Winters is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. . POW is focused on sparking the civic engagement that fuels big climate policy wins like the Inflation Reduction Act.

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For a lot of Dave Polivy’s friends in outdoor specialty retail, online juggernauts like Amazon are seen as a hulking behemoth steamrolling the industry. Many of his contemporaries are reluctant to go anywhere near the e-commerce giant, let alone do business with them.

But Polivy is a realist. “Amazon is about to account for 50 percent of all e-commerce transactions in the world,” he said. “The option to fight Amazon is not realistic.” His solution? Get onboard and embrace that big yellow arrow.

It certainly didn’t start this way for Tahoe Mountain Sports (TMS). The brand was born around a campfire in 2003, when Polivy and two friends, who had all worked together in another outdoor shop, were looking for a change in scenery. “We threw $1,000 each into an idea and said ‘let’s see what happens,’” Polivy said.

For the first three years, TMS was online-only, selling all forms of outdoor gear from hiking, backpacking, and trail running to backcountry ski and snowboard during the winter months. “It was back in the heyday of e-commerce where you could literally just put stuff on websites and watch it sell,” said Polivy. In 2006, Polivy’s wife bought out the two original partners and the couple opened a brick-and-mortar space in Kings Beach, California. After a handful of expansions, they moved in 2014 to their currently location in Truckee, balancing a physical storefront and TMS’s still-running web operation, while looking for ways to link the two halves.

On Harnessing the Power of YouTube


“Originally the mindset of our blog was to drive SEO for our e-commerce website,” said Polivy. “Back in the days when we were ramping up and e-commerce was a priority, we developed a ton of content to support that business.” Gear reviews, event coverage, trip reports, and more all fed towards products on TMS’s website with the intention of boosting search engine traffic and sales. The articles come from employees, who are allowed to write on company time.

Polivy is also proud of that fact that his shop’s YouTube channel crushes it. Its two million views—spread out across product videos and in-store clinics by brand representatives—make it king among other outdoor specialty retailers on this platform, according to Polivy. “The goal is to provide people with additional product information that they couldn’t just get online,” he said.

But aside from SEO, the blog, and the rest of TMS’s online marketing, he’s also focused on building the shop’s credibility in the community. As one of the area’s newer shops, Polivy originally didn’t have the reputation that his competition enjoyed. But, he said, the older age of his competitors meant they were also more traditional and not immersed as deeply in the tech, which Polivy saw as his advantage. “If we could put out some really cool content like ‘Best things to do with your kids in Lake Tahoe,’ hopefully readers would also come and stop in our store.”

It worked, and continues to. “We have people coming into the store telling us ‘The reason I’m here is because I read this article and I knew you had what I was looking for.’” TMS also has a significant number of blog readers from outside of the local area. As a major tourist community, the hope is that as readers pass through, they’ll be more likely to think of Tahoe Mountain Sports as the place to stop for gear. But Polivy has one more trick up his sleeve to catch long-distance revenue, and it doesn’t completely align with common industry thinking.

On Working with Amazon, Rather Than Fighting It


In the last two years, declining online sales (undoubtedly due in part to sites like Amazon) forced TMS to stop selling products on its own website (although the blog lives on), so Polivy began looking for other ways to take advantage of the shop’s still-flowing content. Step one involved taking advantage of affiliate selling programs through Amazon, as well as monetizing TMS’s YouTube account.

“If readers don’t live around us and they click [on product links embedded in articles] and order gear from Amazon, we’re still going to get a percentage of that sale,” said Polivy about the strategy. And he’s not worried about losing brick and mortar sales by driving traffic to a competitor. “If they’re already not going to buy it in our brick-and-mortar location and their immediate reaction is to shop on Amazon, we probably weren’t going to get them to begin with.”

In addition, Polivy said, TMS is a third party seller on Amazon, which means TMS sells its own products, like packs and boots, through Amazon’s marketplace, rather than solely linking to Amazon’s own products. Contributing so heavily to Amazon’s business is somewhat controversial in an industry that’s struggling to compete with the brand, but Polivy said not only is it necessary, but it’s also beneficial to the industry as a whole if it’s done right.

As a retailer, the keys to working with Amazon are held by the gear manufacturers. “Independent retailers are at the bottom of the food chain,” Polivy said. “It’s really the vendor’s choice about how they’re going to handle their Amazon business, whether they’re going to deal with Amazon directly, and whether they’re going to consistently enforce their MAP [minimum advertised pricing] policies. Those are the things that we should be fighting for as specialty retailers.”

He also makes a point that retailers should be stocking in-store what they sell on Amazon, which allows retailers like TMS to take back products they can’t sell online and sell them in-store. This keeps stores from needing to drop prices online in order to get rid of product—a killer of MAP-compliant specialty retail.

On Being Resourceful in Social Media


“Those of us who work and own the store can’t be constantly repping it via social media,” said Polivy. “It’s kind of tacky.” Larger brands are typically the only ones capable of using a fleet of ambassadors, but Tahoe Mountain Sports takes advantage of their own athletes’ knowledge and reach on the small scale. You probably won’t recognize any of them by name—they’re all Tahoe locals—but according to Polivy, TMS sees wide-ranging benefits from its ambassadors. On social media, they actively promote and plug the store in a way that Polivy says he and his staff just can’t do as effectively. The athletes are also vital in product and stocking decisions, regularly testing items and offering feedback to Polivy’s team regarding what to sell and what to take a pass on. Ambassadors also regularly put that information into posts on TMS’s blog.

In the 21st century David vs. Goliath retail environment, Tahoe Mountain Sports has stayed alive by making friends with Goliath.

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