Mount McGhan
mountain in Alaska, United States

Mount McGhan is a 4,730-foot-elevation (1,442-meter) mountain summit in Alaska, United States.
Description
Mount McGhan is located on the Kenai Peninsula on land managed by Chugach National Forest. It is set 23 miles (37 km) north of the city of Seward in the Kenai Mountains. Although modest in elevation, topographic relief is significant as the summit rises 3,275 feet (998 meters) above Crescent Lake in one mile (1.6 km), and 4,300 feet (1,311 meters) above Kenai Lake in two miles (3.2 km). Precipitation runoff from the mountain drains into these two lakes which are part of the Kenai River drainage basin. The mountain was named in 1988 after Bruce McGhan (1953–1986) at the request of his widow, Debra McGhan, with the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly supporting the proposal to honor her late husband who died in an industrial accident.
Climate
Based on the Köppen climate classification, Mount McGhan is located in a subpolar oceanic climate zone with long, cold, snowy winters, and mild summers. Weather systems coming off the Gulf of Alaska are forced upwards by the Kenai Mountains (orographic lift), causing heavy precipitation in the form of rainfall and snowfall.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mount McGhan” is mountain in Alaska, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mount, McGhan and mountain, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “mountain in Alaska, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131127778. Authority coordinates are 60.433, -149.545. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1953 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mount McGhan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.