Something to smile about

By Marilynn Breithart

Naming those peaks

Peak bagging. It happens. I was innocently leading a group of newcomers up a forested trail when we broke out onto a meadow that revealed several stunning peaks.

I called for a short break so that the members of my hiking party might lift their noses up from the rock studded trail and breath them all in.

Naturally the members of my group wanted to know what exactly they were looking at. “Breathtaking peaks,” I replied, but they wanted to know their names.

Dutifully I rattled off the three named peaks before swiftly changing the subject to the weather trying to deflect the next question. No luck.

“What’s that one over there?” a newbie asked.

“Another peak.” I sighed

“I know that! What’s its name?”

“It doesn’t have a name.”

“Oh come on, it’s over 13,000 feet! It’s gotta have a name.”

“Nope. See here on this topo map? No name.”

This revelation inevitably generates discussion or complaints as to why on earth something was not named and why on earth something was named what it was named.

Fortunately I have researched this before. When I first came to the mountains I, too, had this insane idea that every peak and pond had to have a name. Glen Kaye, the naturalist at Rocky Mountain National Park at the time, enlightened me on the subject.

In 1890, our government instituted the “Board of Geographic Names.” Its purpose is to standardize the names of such features as lakes, rivers, and mountains on maps and other official publications. This is to ensure that weekend campers don’t refer to a place as Mt. Weebeelost—which local miners have insisted on calling Proboscis Peak for as long as Old Jake the bartender can remember. This can only lead to fights and further name calling.

Thus this board has naming rules that must be followed. It prefers imaginative names that are unique and suggest local history, folklore, or incident, using Indian or other ethnic names appropriate to the area, which explains why Terra Tomah was named after an old Ivy League college drinking chant “Terr-ah-toh-mah.”

Another rule is that the name should be short and easy to pronounce, which is supposedly why the most majestic mountain in Colorado had its original Indian name “Nesotaieux,” changed to the very unimaginative “Long’s Peak.”

Long’s was named after Major Stephen Long, who led the first government expedition along the base of the Rockies in 1820. But Long never even set foot on the peak named after him; the closest he came was thirty miles away. Plus he had all the imagination of a gnat and simply called it “Highest Peake.” He dismissed the entire Rocky Mountain area as the “Great American Desert,” deeming it unfit for cultivation, and, therefore uninhabitable, except for the “savage” Indians.

This opinion set back settlement of the West and race relations for quite a few years.

So he’s not exactly my hero.

But for this slight historical significance he was honored by having our highest peak named after him.

For every named peak there is some sort of explanation. Yet all this doesn’t explain why we have dozens of thirteeners yet not named. So, I came up with what was (to me at least) a brilliant idea. The Park Service is always in need of money. Why doesn’t the Government run a yearly national lottery? The winner gets to name a peak? Just think of how many people would spend a dollar on a chance to have a mountain named after themselves.

And the winner might have actually climbed one!! I started dreaming about Mt. Breithart.…

Unfortunately another rule is that if you name it after a person, said person has to be dead.

Bummer.

Then again, why not name it after my great-grandfather who is sincerely and appropriately dead and by sheer coincidence also named Breithart.

The truth is that some of these peaks will never be named. Intentionally. For no other purpose than pure philosophical reasons. Like maybe a mountain or a lake can just be a mountain or a lake for itself rather than be associated with our human interactions with nature.

Ergo, no Mt. Myname in the foreseeable future.

This is not all bad. After all, if a mountain name cannot be won via a lottery, it will never be named after the highest bidder. Thus we will never have to climb the likes of Pepsi Peak, Coca-cola Canyon nor Mt. Invesco at Two and a Half Mile High.

Marilynn Breithart is a humor writer, poet, and teacher living in Littleton, Colorado. She is a member of the Shining Mountains Group of the Colorado Mountain Club.