Denali National Park
By Jack McCarthy
Denali National park is a very beautiful sight. It is an awesome destination for hiking and seeing animals. You can also visit and see the mountain, Mount Denali. This park should be on everyone’s bucket list and stay there.
Number Facts
Have you ever wondered how many people visit the park a year, how big the park actually is, or how old it actually is? Keep reading to find out. Over the year of 2014, according to the National Park Service, about 531,315 people visited the park. People can visit year round but most people go in the summer time. The size of the park is 9,492 square miles. There is one road in the whole park that is 92 miles long. Denali National Park was established about 98 years ago. Although the actual mountain was there many years before, the national park was made on February 26, 1917. There are lots of great facts about Denali National Park and these are just some of them.
Mountains
The biggest and most popular attraction at the park is Mount Denali. The mountain is the tallest in North America. It reaches 20,310 feet above sea level. That’s only about 8,000 feet shorter than Mount Everest. The upper half of Denali is always covered with snow and many glaciers, some more than 30 miles long. It can have wind chills up to 118 degrees Fahrenheit. In 1913 people had finally set foot on the 20,310 foot summit. They were Harry Karstens, Walter Harper, Robert Tatum, and Hudson Stuck. Walter was the first person to reach the top. The mountain itself grows about 1 millimeter per year. That means that it would take a decade to grow 1 centimeter. The mountain is a very beautiful sight to see and every one should go there in their lifetime.
Animals
There are lots of different animals in Denali National Park. Some common facts are very interesting. According to the National Parks Service, some of the common ones are bears, wolves, caribou, moose, sheep, foxes, and marmots. Most of the animals are more afraid of people than people are of them, but the most common animal to attack is a bear. There are many attacks each year but only a small fraction of them are deadly. It is important to leave animals and nature alone to prevent those attacks. You can observe it, but do not interfere with it.
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Myth
Back in 5,000,000,001 BC. There was an earth god and a rock god. They were always bored so they came up with an idea. They wanted to make a mountain so they could climb it whenever they wanted. They started punching each other and bashing into each other until they were just a giant pile of rock and dirt in the middle of Alaska. They had created a mountain, but they did not survive. Over time, grass grew and animals came and soon it was Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. They kept trying hard but they failed.