Torreys
Peak

Botanist Charles C. Parry made the first recorded ascent in 1861 and named the peak for John Torrey, a colleague and one of the era's foremost American botanists; Torrey did not visit the mountain himself until 1872, eleven years after it carried his name. The Arapaho referred to Torreys and adjacent Grays Peak together as Heeniiyoowuu, or "ant hills," long before either received an English name from Parry's survey party.

Torreys is almost always climbed together with Grays Peak, its neighbor across a connecting saddle about three-quarters of a mile away, and the two share a single approach through Stevens Gulch above Bakerville. That old townsite was a silver-mining settlement founded in 1865 below Kelso Mountain, and the gulch road running south from it toward the peaks is now reached from the Bakerville exit off Interstate 70.