Three cheers for the Obama Administration’s decision this week to officially restore the name of North America’s tallest mountain to Denali, which is what early inhabitants called the 20,310-foot peak in the Alaska Range.

I spent some time in Denali National Park years ago (where I almost got eaten by a grizzly bear), and nobody called the mountain McKinley. It would have been like visiting South Carolina and saluting a Confederate flag — oh, wait a minute ...

Anyway, in 1896, a misguided gold prospector had named the mountain to support the presidential candidacy of William McKinley, who won the election and took office the following year. Never mind that for centuries the Koyukon Athabaskans simply referred to the peak as Dinale or Denali, meaning “high” or “tall.”

The decision to honor McKinley was almost the stupidest mountain-naming ever. First of all, the 25th president never visited Alaska, never climbed a mountain and never showed any particular interest in geography, except when it came to expanding the American empire by acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.

I say “almost” the stupidest naming, because an even more idiotic proposal by the New Hampshire state legislature in 2003 would have changed the name of Mount Clay in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to Mount Reagan as homage to our 40th president, who had one of the worst environmental records in U.S. history.

I’ll admit the 5,533-foot peak, named in 1848 for Henry Clay, a Kentucky senator and U.S. secretary of state who ran unsuccessfully for president several times, deserves a better moniker, but even calling it Inferior Lump of Rock That Lies In The Shadow Of Majestic Mount Washington would be better than calling it Mount Reagan — and The U.S. Board of Geographic Names agreed. Five years ago the panel finally voted to continue to keep the name Mount Clay.

Why is it newcomers so often insist on changing perfectly good native names?

Denali is one of the so-called Seven Summits, the tallest peaks on each continent, the highest, of course being Everest in Asia.

When I hiked in Nepal’s Khumbu region years ago the Sherpas called the 29,029 mountain Sagarmāthā. Had I been hiking in neighboring Tibet the natives would have called it Chomolungma. Natives in Darjeeling also called the peak “Deodungha” (“Holy Mountain.”)

In 1865, though, along came Andrew Waugh, the British Surveyor General of India, who recommended that the mountain be named after his predecessor, Sir George Everest.

I wish they’d go back to Sagarmāthā, Chomolungma and Deodungha.

Thankfully, neither the Brits nor Americans ever conquered South America, so Aconcagua, that continent’s tallest peak, has kept its native name. For the record, I came within a few thousand feet of reaching the 22,837 feet summit in the Andes on the Argentinian-Chilean border before giving in to exhaustion and relentless snowstorms.

Various derivations of Aconcagua include Quechua Ackon Cahuak, meaning “’Sentinel of Stone” or Quechua Anco Cahuac, “White Sentinel.”

Another of the Seven Summits, Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, also apparently has retained its native name, though the exact derivation remains unclear. Some linguists believe it was adapted from the Kiswahili or Swahili names for “mountain of greatness” or “mountain of caravans.”

Russia’s Mount Elbrus, Europe’s tallest peak at 18,510 feet, also reflects a combination of native languages, including Persian, Kurdish and Indo-European, and also references a legendary mountain in Iranian mythology.

The two remaining tallest continental peaks have adopted the Anglo practice of ignoring native nomenclature.

In 1840 Polish explorer Paul Edmund Strzelecki named Australia’s tallest peak, 7,310-foot Mount Kosciuszko, in honor of the Polish national hero and hero of the American Revolutionary War General Tadeusz Kościuszko. In so doing he set aside several native Aboriginal names that all translated to “Table Top Mountain.”

Antarctica’s highest peak, 16,050-foot Mountain Vinson, was named in 1961 for Carl G. Vinson, a Georgia congressman who supported Antarctic exploration.

Mountains, of course, are not the only entities with replaced names that cast aside native appellations.

Lakes, rivers, oceans — even nations — have been subject to the practice.

After all, we in the United States can thank Italian explorer Americus Vespucci for our name.

And here in southeastern Connecticut we’ve managed to import Old World nomenclature (New London, the Thames River, Versailles, Baltic, to name a few) while retaining Native American language (Poquonnock Bridge, Poquetanuck, Noank, Quiambaug) for various villages and other features.

Even the name “Connecticut” is the Algonquin word for “Long Tidal River.”

So, welcome home, Denali. Let’s hope your renaming starts a trend.