Letter: What about Mount Foraker?

I read with interest Rick Sinnott’s column in the Jan. 5 ADN about the latest discussion about Denali vs. Mount McKinley. Forty-odd years ago I found myself driving tours in what was then Mount McKinley National Park. In talking about North America’s tallest peak, I and other drivers would throw in the fact that Mount McKinley’s neighbor, Mount Foraker, was also named for an Ohio politician: Joseph B. Foraker, who was a governor and then a U.S. senator back around the time Teddy Roosevelt was president. My tour driver joke in light of this fact was that some of us tour drivers while tipping a few in the Gold Spike Saloon, endeavored to promote the naming of a prominent Ohio geographic feature after one of our political leaders. However, after studying maps of Ohio, we discovered that there were no prominent geographical features in an otherwise outstanding state and we abandoned the project.

It seems to me that the fine folks of Ohio and our president-elect should be content to have the second-highest peak in Alaska (third highest in the United States) named for one of their distinguished political leaders.

— Mark Lovegreen, Anchorage

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