Article

Mount Logan

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited June 12, 2015

Mount Logan, elev 5959 m, is Canada's highest mountain, named after Sir William E. Logan by Prof I.C. Russell, who first saw it during an attempted ascent of Mt St Elias in 1890.

Mount Logan
Mount Logan is the highest mountain in Canada, and was named for Sir William Logan, first director of the Canadian Geological Survey (photo by Richard Harrington).

Situated in the Yukon T's St Elias Mts, it is one of the world's most massive mountain blocks, rising abruptly 4150 m above the flat Seward Glacier on the south side. The mountain is largely composed of granodiorite, a granitic rock of intrusive origin. Multiple summits rise above a NW-SE elongated snow and ice plateau varying in elevation between 4500 m and 5400 m and extending over a distance of 19 km. Three of the summits exceed 5890 m in elevation.

In 1925, a joint Canadian-US expedition, led by A.H. MacCarthy, made the first ascents of the Weak Peak (5915 m) and the High Peak (5950 m, then believed to be 6050 m high; the peak was determined to be 5950 m, but a resurvey of the mountain in 1992 established its height at 5959 m). The mountain has now been climbed by 13 different routes. For more than a decade, ending in 1980, a high-altitude physiology research program was conducted by a joint US-Canadian medical team from a camp at 5303 m, supported by the Arctic Institute of North America and the Canadian Armed Forces. Meteorological and glaciological research has been carried out on the NW col (5340 m).