The Man Who
Reached the
Summit First

A Discredited Claim and an Honest Near-Miss

In September 1906, Frederick Cook telegraphed the world that he had reached Mount McKinley's summit by a new route from the north. The claim didn't survive scrutiny. Cook's own packer, Edward Barrill, later signed an affidavit disavowing it, and in 1956 mountaineer Bradford Washburn matched Cook's supposed summit photograph to a minor rock outcrop roughly nineteen miles from, and more than five thousand feet below, the actual summit, a spot climbers still call Fake Peak. Combined with Cook's later, equally discredited claim to have reached the North Pole, the 1906 ascent is generally treated today as settled: it never happened.

The far stranger story is the 1910 Sourdough Expedition. Four Alaska prospectors, Tom Lloyd, Charlie McGonagall, Billy Taylor, and Pete Anderson, set out with minimal mountaineering equipment and, by multiple retellings, carried donuts, hot cocoa, and a fourteen-foot spruce pole meant to fly an American flag visible all the way from Fairbanks. Taylor and Anderson made it to the top of the North Peak, genuinely climbing the mountain with essentially amateur gear, but the North Peak sits slightly lower than the true South Peak summit. Years later, the 1913 party reportedly spotted their pole from a distance, corroborating that the Sourdough climbers really had reached the top of the peak they climbed. They just hadn't reached the mountain's actual high point.

An Archdeacon, a Future Superintendent, and Two Guides Who Never Got Credit

The expedition that finally succeeded was led by Hudson Stuck, an Episcopal archdeacon, alongside Harry Karstens, who would go on to become the park's first superintendent eight years later. Walter Harper and Robert Tatum rounded out the four who reached the summit. But the expedition depended on two other men who never summited and rarely appear in the story at all: Esaias George, who was Koyukon, and John Fredson, Neets'ai Gwich'in, both mushers and hunters who supplied the freight and basecamp support the climbing party needed to survive weeks on the mountain.

Fredson's role deserves more than a footnote. Born around 1895 near the Sheenjek River, he stayed alone at the expedition's Mount McKinley basecamp for thirty-one days waiting for the summit team to come back down. He later became one of the first Alaska Natives to earn a college degree, graduating from the University of the South in 1930, and a school in Venetie, Alaska still carries his name. George died of what was likely influenza in December 1920 in Stevens Village; far less of his story survives.

Why Harper Went First

Walter Harper was born in Tanana, Alaska, in late 1892, the son of Seentaana, who was Koyukon Athabascan, and Arthur Harper, an Irish-descended prospector. He was educated at Saint Mark's Mission school in Nenana and later mentored directly by Hudson Stuck at St. Stephen's Mission in Fort Yukon. When the four-man party made its final push on June 7, 1913, it was Harper who went first onto the true summit, the first human being in recorded history to stand there.

He didn't get long to enjoy the fame that followed. A 1914 New York Times feature covered a public appearance at Coney Island showing off feats of strength and marksmanship. He married Frances Wells, a missionary nurse stationed at Fort Yukon. Then, on October 25, 1918, both were aboard the steamship Princess Sophia when it sank en route from Skagway to Vancouver, killing everyone on board, more than 350 people. Harper was 25. The ranger station that now serves as Denali's mountaineering headquarters in Talkeetna carries his name today, the Walter Harper Talkeetna Ranger Station, a quieter kind of monument than a summit but a permanent one.

The West Buttress, and What It Takes Now

The West Buttress route is the standard line up the mountain today, and Talkeetna remains the climbing gateway, exactly as it was in 1913, now formalized through the Walter Harper Talkeetna Ranger Station. Climbers must register at least sixty days before an attempt on Denali or nearby Mount Foraker, and the mountaineering rangers there handle route information, permits, and the Clean Mountain Cans climbers are required to pack out human waste in.

The mountain hasn't gotten any smaller or any warmer. What's changed since 1913 is mostly logistics: fixed ropes on the standard route, weather forecasting, and a rescue infrastructure that didn't exist when Harper, Stuck, Karstens, and Tatum climbed with wool clothing and no radio contact with the outside world. The summit itself is still 20,310 feet, still one of the coldest, highest-relief mountains on earth relative to its base, and still, on the day it matters most, entirely dependent on the same thing it depended on in 1913: whoever's strongest going up last.

Facts and figures checked against the National Park Service's own articles on Walter Harper and the 1913 expedition's unsung support crew, its current mountaineering and backcountry-climbing pages, and its 2026 season wrap-up. The Sourdough Expedition's donuts, cocoa, and spruce-pole details are widely repeated across popular retellings and secondary histories; the core claim, that the 1910 party summited the North Peak rather than the true South Peak summit, is corroborated, but the specific objects carried are not confirmed on an NPS-published page. The 2026 season statistics are themselves marked preliminary by NPS pending its final annual summary.

Walter Harper stood on the summit for less than five years of the life he had left. He drowned at twenty-five, on a ship that never made it to Vancouver, a decade after standing somewhere no human being had ever stood before. The mountain has been climbed thousands of times since, by better-equipped parties following a route with a name and fixed lines. None of them were first. That belongs permanently to a young man from Tanana who went up ahead of everyone else because he was strong enough to.