Harper Lodge Opens in Denali Park

If Harper Lodge’s logs could speak, what stories they would tell--of the conquest of McKinley’s Peak, and brave pioneers who climbed and fell.

The logs were silent, but there were eloquent voices to speak for them during the evening of May 29.

The evening was the formal grand opening for the first summer season of Harper Lodge at Denali National Park, but it was above all a tribute to the memory of Walter Harper. At the age of 21, Harper, the son of an Athabascan Indian mother and Irish father, became the first climber to reach the 20,320-foot summit of Mt. McKinley, highest peak in North America and possessor of a greater vertical relief than Mt. Everest.

The history-making moment of reaching McKinley’s icy summit came on June 7, 1913. Now, 74 years later, the opening of the lodge named after Harper was being celebrated with a poem written for the occasion by Alaskan poet Larry Beck.

The poem set the mood for the unveiling of a portrait of Harper, painted by Alaskan artist Jon Van Zyle to commemorate the opening of the new lodge.

Both the poem and the portrait will now be part of the Denali experience for all who visit or overnight at the 154-room lodge, while getting to know one of the world’s most majestic national parks.

Family Memories

Harper’s niece, Yvonne Mozee of Sitka, Alaska, stepped to the microphone during opening ceremonies to share family memories of the young mountaineer whose life was a triumph and a tragedy that could have inspired a play by Shakespeare.

Thus began what figures to be Denali’s best summer season ever. It was on Feb. 26, 1917, that President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the bill establishing what was then Mt. McKinley National Park.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation adding more than 2.5 million acres to expand the renamed Denali National Park to a total of nearly 6 million acres, enhancing the role of interior Alaska as one of the world’s last great frontiers offering an opportunity for wilderness adventures. It was the Athabaskan Indians who had given Mt. McKinley the name of Denali, which means “the big one.”

Although the park is only 250 miles below the Arctic Circle, and about the same distance north of Anchorage, the annual visitor count is expected to reach 1 million in the next four years. The count has already doubled during the past five years, and is projected to reach 600,000 this year.

Adventurous visitors who would like to try following Walter Harper’s trail to the summit of Mt. McKinley can make advance arrangements for a summertime attempt.

Within the vastness of the park are many less-demanding discovery hikes with and without a ranger guide; one is as short as a half-mile walk to overlook the sparkling beauty of Horseshoe Lake. A 1 1/2-hour “Welcome Walk” leaves at 4 p.m. daily for a nature stroll through the spruce-aspen forest.

Few return from shuttles to Wonder Lake or Eielson Visitor Center without having seen a grizzly who may stand up to stare back imperiously. Sheep and caribou graze within view on the alpine tundra. Moose, red fox and wolves appear unexpectedly in a setting of more than 500 varieties of wildflowers. And it’s a bird watchers’ paradise with more than 130 species of birds.

You can get off a shuttle to explore on foot, then catch a later bus back.

Daily Demonstrations

There are daily sled-dog demonstrations at the kennels behind park headquarters. Auditorium programs include an award-winning wildlife movie, plus narrated slide shows about the history, wildlife, geology and plant life at the park. Evening campground talks deal with everything from grizzlies and glaciers to instructions on how to hike safely.

Many of the park’s programs also are offered within the confines of the Denali National Park Hotel and the McKinley Chalet Resort on the east boundary.

A number of packages are available, including the two-day, one-night “Overnighter,” which offers a Tundra Wildlife Tour along with accommodations at either the hotel or the McKinley Chalet Resort on the park’s east boundary for $84 per person, double occupancy. Call (907) 276-7234.

The new Harper Lodge has been built as the first hotel property of Princess Tours, a division of Princess Cruises. Like the other hotel and camping facilities, it will be open until mid-September, before the long winter begins.

This is a full-service lodge with a 60-seat cocktail lounge, 120-seat dining room, 64-seat conference room and two outdoor hot spas. Deluxe rooms have their own Jacuzzis. Rates begin at $112 per night, single or double occupancy.

The $6.3-million lodge is at Milepost 238.5, coming northward on the George Parks Highway from Anchorage, and is available to guests arriving on their own by car, train or bus, as well as those on Princess Tours heading north as far as Prudhoe Bay above the Arctic Circle. For more information, call (800) 426-0442.

The Star Attraction

Wherever you stay in and around Denali National Park, Mt. McKinley is always the star attraction. The dream of every visitor, it seems, is to see at least for a few moments the awesome grandeur of its ice-sculptured slopes and summit. The summit can be cloud-hidden for as much as 75% of the summer.

When Captain George Vancouver explored Alaska’s Cook Inlet in 1794, he glimpsed what he described as the “distant and stupendous” mountain far to the north. After Alaska became part of the Russian Empire, Mt. McKinley was Bulshaia Gora, the “Great Mountain.”

There were many early attempts to climb McKinley, and claims to have succeeded that proved false. The North Peak was successfully climbed by two grizzled sourdoughs, but the 850-foot-high South Peak remained unconquered until young Walter Harper was the lead member of a party of four to reach the summit.

The story now shared with visitors to Harper Lodge is one of the great human dramas in mountaineering.

Harper’s Irish father had documented the first overland sighting of Mt. McKinley in 1878. When Walter Harper was 18, he went to work for Hudson Stuck, Episcopal Archdeacon of the Yukon who often carried his ministry into the wilderness with sled dogs.

Harper became an interpreter and guide for the traveling ministry of Stuck, who in turn took on the task of educating the young man.

The adventurous Archdeacon formed an expedition to challenge Mt. McKinley. He made Harper one of the four to attempt the final ascent, writing in his journal of the young man’s “pluck and endurance,” his six feet of height and great mountaineering strength, “his kindliness and invincible amiability that endeared him to every member of the party.”

Harper was the only one of the four who slept through the freezing cold high on the mountain during the night of June 6, 1913. He wore six pairs of socks inside his moccasins, yet could still manage to walk lightly.

It was 4 degrees below zero in the sunlight of early morning as the foursome began the last nine hours of climbing from the 18,000-foot level. The Archdeacon’s journal tells of the last moments of approaching the summit:

“With keen excitement we pushed on. Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a Native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska’s greatest mountain, and he had well earned the honor.”

The Archdeacon fell into unconsciousness for a few moments in the thin air atop the mountain, but then, as he wrote, all shared in the kind of “vision” that can come “only once, perhaps, in any lifetime.”

Return to Alaska

For a few short years it looked as though life would keep Walter Harper at its summit. The Archdeacon arranged for the young celebrity to study for three years at Mt. Hermon School in Massachusetts to begin preparations for a medical career. Returning to Alaska, Harper picked up yellow fever on a mission with the Archdeacon but quickly recovered at Fort Yukon’s Mission Hospital. There he fell in love with a charming young nurse named Frances Wells.

They married and the world seemed to belong to them as they left for Philadelphia. Once there, Frances planned to work for the Red Cross and 25-year-old Walter intended to study medicine’s possible application in the dawning age of aviation.

They sailed joyfully from Whitehorse aboard the Princess Sophia. During the middle of the night, the vessel struck Vanderbilt Reef in Lynn Canal. All aboard were lost.

Standing before Jon Van Zyle’s portrait in Harper Lodge, we felt that Walter Harper had come home to Denali. We thought of one part of Larry Beck’s poem:

So Walter Harper’s deed lives on

And here we honor Walter’s name

And remember other friends now gone

Who deserve everlasting fame.