Mount
Belford

James Burns Belford, born in Pennsylvania in 1837, was appointed an associate justice of the Colorado Territorial Supreme Court in 1870, then won election as Colorado's first U.S. representative after statehood in 1876. He returned to Congress for three more terms between 1879 and 1885, chairing a Treasury oversight committee. Coloradans called him the 'Red Rooster of the Rockies' for his red hair and beard; in the mid-1890s he defended Denver crime boss Soapy Smith in court.

Belford sits among the Collegiate Peaks, a Sawatch cluster named largely for universities: Harvard and Yale in 1869, Columbia in 1916, and Oxford, the last, in 1925. Belford's own name breaks that pattern — a group of miners chose it for the judge and congressman rather than a college. No first-ascent party or date survives in the record, a common gap among these peaks, since area miners and surveyors almost certainly reached the summit well before anyone wrote it down.