Mount
Harvard

Members of Harvard University's first mining-school class named the peak in 1869 during a Sawatch Range expedition led by professor Josiah Dwight Whitney, namesake of Mount Whitney. The same trip named the neighboring summit Mount Yale, for Whitney's alma mater. On August 19, 1869, expedition members S.F. Sharpless and William M. Davis reached the top in the first recorded ascent, and the paired names later drew Princeton, Columbia and Oxford to nearby peaks, giving the cluster its Collegiate Peaks name.

In 1962, a group of Harvard alumni tried to plant a 14-foot pole on the summit with a sign claiming an inflated elevation, but darkness stopped them short of the top. The following year two Harvard men, including future U.S. senator Tim Wirth, returned with a Cornell graduate and finished the job. The pole stood for roughly two decades before disappearing sometime in the 1980s.