Mount
Blue
Sky

The peak was named Mount Evans in 1895 for John Evans, Colorado's second territorial governor. In 2023 the U.S. Board on Geographic Names renamed it Mount Blue Sky after research by Northwestern University and the University of Denver detailed Evans's role in the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, in which soldiers killed an estimated 150 to 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, most of them elderly people, women and children. The Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes proposed the new name, drawn from the Arapaho self-designation as the Blue Sky People and a Cheyenne ceremony of renewal.

Painter Albert Bierstadt is often credited with the first ascent in 1863, guided by newspaperman William Byers while he sketched the range, though the record is ambiguous about which nearby summit his party actually reached; a rival account credits an 1872 climb by a Judge Lunt. The mountain's better-documented legacy is its road: built between 1923 and 1930 by the City and County of Denver and the federal Bureau of Public Roads, it remains the highest paved road in North America.