Mount
Sneffels

Hayden Survey geologist Frederic Endlich named the peak in 1874 for Snæfell, the Icelandic volcano in Jules Verne's novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth; by one account he called out the name on first sighting the summit. Endlich, Franklin Rhoda, Allen D. Wilson and a survey packer named Ford made the first recorded ascent that September 10, hauling brass triangulation instruments to the top. A rival U.S. Army survey briefly pushed the name Mount Blaine, but Sneffels was the name locals kept, and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names confirmed it in 1906.

Silver drew miners into the Sneffels basin through the 1880s: the town of Sneffels, at 10,650 feet on the peak's south face, grew to roughly 2,000 people with a school, a post office and its own brass band, built around the Revenue-Virginius Mine. A two-mile drainage tunnel begun in 1888 kept the mine workable, but a 1915 fire hastened the town's decline. Congress protected the peak's high country as the Mount Sneffels Wilderness in 1980.