Mount
Bierstadt

Painter Albert Bierstadt visited the area in 1863 with guide William Byers, sketching the peaks around Chicago Lakes for his later canvas A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie; the record is ambiguous about whether the summit his party reached that year was this mountain or its neighbor, now Mount Blue Sky. The Colorado Geographic Board and the U.S. Geographic Board formally attached Bierstadt's name to this peak in 1914, on a suggestion from Denver botany teacher Ellsworth Bethel.

Because the ascent is an easy walk-up by Colorado 14er standards, no reliable record survives of who actually first stood on this specific summit; prospectors chasing Georgetown's 1870s silver boom likely beat any named climbing party to the top. Today it draws some of the state's heaviest 14er traffic, aided by a trailhead near 11,700 feet on Guanella Pass that leaves roughly 2,400 feet of climbing to the summit.