Mount
Wilson

Topographer A.D. Wilson and Franklin Rhoda of the 1874 Hayden Survey made the first recorded ascent of Mount Wilson on September 13 of that year, climbing the difficult south ridge and naming the peak for Wilson himself. Maps once labeled it Glacier Mountain, a name that persisted until the current one was standardized by 1906. The mountain still carries four small unnamed glaciers near its summit, the southernmost active ice in the Rocky Mountains outside California's Sierra Nevada.

Mount Wilson ranks among the hardest of Colorado's fourteeners to climb; its standard North Face route from Navajo Basin crosses permanent snowfields sometimes called the Navajo Glacier and typically calls for an ice axe and crampons. The Wilson group's connecting ridges have proven deadly: a 2010 rockslide and lightning storm killed climber Peter Topp on the Mount Wilson–El Diente traverse, and a 2024 fall of roughly 800 feet killed hiker John James Coffee on the ridge between Wilson Peak and El Diente. Both underscore the route-finding demands of the massif.