A brief history of Mt. Harvard

In 1869, Harvard sponsored a group to explore and survey peak elevations in the Sawatch Range. Long-standing rumors had it that some summits were in excess of 18,000 feet. Most members of this party traveled West on the newly opened First / Great Transcontinental (‘Pacific’) Railroad to Cheyenne, Wyoming, then went overland by stagecoach to Denver (which did not yet have rail service).

The Harvard Geographic Expedition of 1869 to the Colorado Territory did find peaks in excess of 14,000 feet, and named the two highest summits they encountered and ascended Mount Harvard (for their sponsor) and Mount Yale (for the alma mater of the two leaders of this expedition: Josiah Dwight Whitney (Yale, 1839) and William Henry Brewer (Yale, 1852).

Both of these men and others of the party were heavily involved in similar, contemporary surveying of California. The group called these two the ‘College Peaks’. After subsequent naming of neighboring peaks Mounts Princeton (1873), Columbia (1916), and Oxford (1931), they became and remain known collectively as the Collegiate Peaks. All but Mount Princeton lie within the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness Area.

You will find an additional RMHUC article on Mt. Harvard here