> > > Aren't they(McKinley and Denali) mountains, also?
> >
> > They? You mean it. Denali is the real name, McKinley the Westernized name.
>
> Just to set the record straight, it was Denali for centuries. But when the US bought Alaska from Russia, the politicans started naming stuff after
> people they wanted to honor. (Honor in this case means "repay favor.") This went on for some time and one of those honored people was an obscure US president named McKenley. He never went to Alaska and he never saw the mountain they named for him. My guess is that he didn't give a hoot anyway. After Alaska became a state in 1959, the citizens started the slow process of replacing the original names to geographic features and the correct name of Denali was one of them. So far, no objection from McKenley, who is dead. The same thing is happening in Hawaii where native names are slowly being restored. Frankly, I think Denali is a majestic name for a majestic mountain. I couldn't call it anything else.
> Howard

We have that here too. A lot of the names given by early European explorers, settlers etc have officially reverted to Maori names. Some replacements I agree with, some I don't, usually on completely arbitrary grounds. For example, I totally agree that Mt Taranaki is better than Mt Egmont, because Egmont sounds unpleasant. Our highest mountain is Mt Cook, or Aorangi (which means Cloud Piercer), both names are official and I like both of them.
On the other hand, there is one small town (named after some boring obscure politician) whose citizens firmly resist the notion of changing back to the area's original name, which translated loosely to "a big pile of dung."
Might as well tell you my favourite story relating to mountains. If you have a look at an atlas, you will see that there are a bunch of mountains (volcanoes) in the middle of NZ's North Island. They are Ruapehu, Tongariro and Ngaruahoe, and by the way have some awesome skiing. Way off to the west, at the edge of the sea, is Mt Taranaki. The story goes that he used to live in the middle of the island with the rest of them, but had an argument with (I think) Ruapehu over one of the other mountains who Ruapehu was married to. (Don't ask me.) So Taranaki ran off as far as he could, carving out a river in the process. He had to stop when he got to the coast, but you can see that Ruapehu is still feeling a bit pissed off about the whole thing, because he's still steaming and now and then he blows his top.

Brunnen-"skiing on an active volcano rules"G