The Collegiate Peaks: An Ivy League of Mountains
Near Buena Vista, Colorado
Look west from Buena Vista and you are facing the highest concentration of fourteen thousand foot peaks in the Rocky Mountains, and they carry some unexpected names. Harvard. Yale.
Princeton. Columbia. Oxford.
A range of summits named like a university reading list. The naming started in the summer of eighteen sixty nine, when Josiah Dwight Whitney, a Yale graduate who founded the Harvard mining school, led a survey expedition of Harvard students into this valley. Whitney and his party measured the two biggest mountains and named them for the schools that shaped him, Harvard for the expedition's home institution and Yale for his alma mater.
Two of his men made the first recorded climb of Mount Harvard that August. They called the cluster the College Peaks, and the theme took on a life of its own. In eighteen seventy three, Henry Gannett, chief topographer of the Hayden Survey, added Mount Princeton, replacing the older name Chalk Mountain.
In nineteen sixteen, Roger Wolcott Toll, a Columbia graduate and a founder of the Colorado Mountain Club, gave Mount Columbia its name. Mount Oxford came last, named by John Jerome Hart, a Colorado climber and Rhodes Scholar honoring his English university, though accounts differ on whether that happened in the nineteen twenties or early thirties. Mount Harvard, at fourteen thousand four hundred twenty one feet, is the third highest summit in the Rocky Mountains, so the ranking arguments write themselves.
Around here they just call the whole wall the Collegiates.
