Mount
Yale

Josiah Whitney, a Harvard professor and himself a Yale graduate, led the 1869 survey party that named this summit for Elihu Yale, the university's principal benefactor, while giving the taller neighboring peak the name Mount Harvard for the school where he taught. The wave of alma-mater names that surveyors bestowed on these summits — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia — became the range's enduring identity as the Collegiate Peaks.

Whitney's party, joined by William Brewer, William Davis, Robert Moore and S. Sharpless, reached the summit with him on August 18, 1869, the same summer the group worked its way across the newly named Collegiate Peaks. Early government surveys had Yale and Princeton trading places in elevation by a foot or two, prompting decades of good-natured, rival alumni cairn-building at each summit.