Crampon: Crampon View 1

This is a pair of heavy, galvanized, sheet metal crampons for climbing boots with points on the bottom and slotted uprights for boot straps on top. The front and back sections are hinged so as to bend with the boot. The homemade crampons were left on the Muldrow Glacier on Mount McKinley by members of the 1910 Sourdough Expedition. They were found and recovered by the Lindley-Liek Expedition in 1932. Condition note: Two rivets for the strip attaching front and back sections of the right crampon are missing.

Denali is North America's highest mountain, and mountain climbing has become a part of the park's identity. These crampons signify the self-reliance of making your own stuff and reflect Denali's spirit of adventure. The crampons survived against the odds and draw meaning from the Gold Rush, the dramatic landscape and speaks to that adventurer's spirit. Denali is about climbing and exploring, and this piece best represents that feeling.

In November 1909, in Fairbanks, Alaska, four gold miners, Tom Lloyd, Peter Anderson, Charley McGonagall, and Bill Taylor, set out to be the first to climb Mount McKinley to win a bet., and to disprove explorer Frederick Cook's claim that he had summited Mount McKinley in 1906. The trip began in December 1909 as the group left Fairbanks with their horses, mule, and dog teams. McGonagall's prospecting experiences near Cache Creek at the base of Mount McKinley had discovered a pass overlooking the vast glacier. This pass would be a door to the summit. Anderson had pioneered a shortcut from Broad Pass to the Kantishna, over the Alaska Range, and had developed expertise in glacier travel. All of them knew cold, snow, and daily hardship.

On April 3, 1910, the group, minus Lloyd, set out to reach the summit. With a bag of doughnuts, three thermoses of hot chocolate, some caribou meat, and a 14-foot spruce pole, they became the first party to summit the 19,470-foot north peak of Mount McKinley (Denali). They became known as the Sourdough Expedition, and had met the challenge of climbing with what is considered rudimentary gear and no technical climbing experience. In 1913, the Hudson-Stuck climbing party saw the spruce pole when they summited the south peak and verified that the Sourdough Expedition had summited the north peak. In 1916, the route the Sourdough Expedition used would become McGonagall Pass, a climbing route still popularly used today by hikers, backpackers and climbers.