Spring 2006

Colorado's Sewanee Peak
Photo by Merritt Blakeslee

Is a Colorado mountain named for the Mountain?

By Merritt Blakeslee, C'68

    If you follow the valley of the Arkansas River south from its headwaters on Tennessee Pass toward Buena Vista, the western horizon unfolds a panorama of some of the most majestic mountain peaks in Colorado. This is the Sawatch Range. Twelve of its summits, including the three highest in Colorado, rise more than 14,000 feet above sea level. In the range’s center, where the great peaks rise from the valley floor in an unbroken sweep of 6,000 feet, their names — Mount Oxford, Mount Harvard, Mount Columbia, Mount Yale, and Mount Princeton — crystallize around a single idea.
    The five Collegiate Peaks are among the best-known mountains in the Colorado Rockies. Yet few know that a smaller peak, which rises just 10 miles to the south of Mount Princeton, deserves inclusion in this group. Its name is Sewanee Peak.
    While the logic coupling Sewanee Peak with the University of the South might elude the layman, it is immediately obvious to anyone who knows the Mountain. As Tam Carlson, C’63, professor of English, remarked when I first told him of it, “It’s the smallest and the southernmost of the Collegiate Peaks. What else could it have been named?”

    I matriculated at the University of the South in 1964, where I had been born while my father attended the college. My family moved to Colorado just after I entered Sewanee, and, in the years that followed, I climbed extensively among the high peaks of Colorado. In the summer of 1973, before returning to Sewanee to spend the fall semester teaching in the French Department, I consulted the newest edition of the Guide to the Colorado Mountains, which, for the first time, included a reference to Sewanee Peak. In early July, infused with a spirit of scholarly inquiry, my brother Joel, C’74; Dana Carlson, C’71; Sad Eyes, a Sewanee dog; and I climbed the 13,132-foot peak.
    From Hancock Lake, it was an easy scramble, first up a gentle snowfield, then over sun-warmed granite blocks to the summit. We were lucky with the perfect weather, a rare gift so early in the climbing season. The sky remained an impossibly deep shade of blue until the middle of the afternoon, when a few clouds appeared. From the summit, we looked down nearly a thousand feet to a nameless, fan-shaped lake in the cirque north of the summit, the surface still covered with ice.
    Immediately after our climb, I set out to discover if, in fact, Sewanee equated to Sewanee. I spent many hours researching in the collections of Denver’s libraries and corresponded with the Board on Geographic Names of the U.S. Geological Survey. I discovered nothing in the former, while the BGN told me only that the name was derived from “local usage.” Finally, in 1991, the BGN disclosed that the decision to name Sewanee Peak was based on a 1953 memorandum but went on to say that it was missing from their files. Late in 2004, at my prodding, they finally located the long-lost 1953 document that established the peak’s name, and I was at last able to prove what I had never doubted: that the memo’s author had attended Sewanee. Obtaining a telephone number from Sewanee’s Alumni Office, I placed a call to Golden, Colorado, and asked the gentleman who answered the telephone if it was he who had named Sewanee Peak more than 50 years before. With no perceptible surprise in his voice, he replied, “I did it.”

    When Charles “Robby” Robinson graduated from high school in 1937, his father — a member of the faculty of the Vanderbilt School of Medicine — urged him to apply to the University of the South. “Dad had a great respect for Sewanee,” particularly for Roy Benton Davis, Sewanee’s professor of chemistry; and his urging prevailed. Robinson matriculated in 1937, a member of the class of 1941.
    After two years, he transferred to the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in Houghton, Michigan, (today Michigan Tech) to continue the study of geology, Sewanee having no such course in its curriculum at the time. Following the war, he enrolled in the doctoral program in the University of Colorado’s Department of Geology. Upon completing his coursework, he joined the USGS in 1948.
    Along with senior USGS team member McClelland “Mac” Dings, he was assigned to update the geological description of the USGS Garfield Colorado 15’ Quadrangle, which covers some 240 square miles in the south central Sawatch Range just south of Mount Princeton. It is broken terrain lying at elevations between 8,990 and 14,155 feet and bisected from north to south by the Continental Divide. Sculpted by glaciers, it abounds in deep cirques, U-shaped valleys, moraines, lake basins, broad and rolling divides, and narrow, knife-edge ridges. Within this region, the contour lines on the map crowd close together. In early July at elevations above 12,000 feet, the snow still lies thick and the lakes still have a covering of ice.
    The project was an important one, as the Garfield Quadrangle had seen some of the most profitable mining activity in the entire state during the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. Surveying the geology and correcting the geography involved walking the entire area of the Garfield Quadrangle, although “walking” is a pale description of what the job actually entailed.
    As Robinson proceeded with his survey, he quickly realized that the old map was full of errors. “One 13,000-foot peak was shown as only 11,000 feet. It used to make me mad every time I had to walk over it.” He resurveyed extensive portions of the quadrangle, using the same old-fashioned plane table techniques and cumbersome telescopic alidades used by the original USGS surveyors; other portions he was able to check by altimeter against accurately located benchmarks.
    So “walking” involved the strenuous navigation of steep, rocky peaks — often on slopes covered with loose talus — carrying heavy, antiquated surveying equipment. But this was primarily a geological, and only secondarily a geographical, survey. So the “walking” also involved carrying back geologic specimens — rocks — to be sliced into microscopic sections for examination by light refraction.
    Robinson spent four summers, from 1948 through 1951, in the field, climbing on and over Sewanee Peak many times. Robinson and Dings were charged with correcting all the errors in the Garfield Quadrangle, not just the topographic errors. So in 1953, while USGS was preparing to reissue a corrected version of the quadrangle, Robinson, who was then on a tour of administrative duty in Washington, D.C., wrote to the Board on Geographic Names to propose corrections and additions to the nomenclature of the Garfield Quadrangle. All but one of his proposed changes involved names of features that were wrongly located or that had appeared on earlier maps but had been dropped from the 1945 map. The last addition, which Robinson unblushingly attributed to “local usage,” was “Sewanee Peak.”
    Why did he do it? His sense of humor was involved. “The USGS work was pretty tedious. I had to correct a hell of a lot of names and I just slipped it in. I had been in the military, which is a bureaucracy like the USGS. There, you learn how to get around anything.”
    But it was far more than a prank. “I enjoyed Sewanee. It was all male in those days, of course. The honor system worked.” He was a handball champion, hiked and caved, and joined the ΣAE fraternity. He remembered particularly Roy Benton Davis, professor of chemistry, and Abbott Martin, professor of English. “Professor Davis was an excellent teacher who would spend lots of time with the students.” “Abbo” (as Professor Martin was affectionately known) persecuted him good-naturedly in his class on Victorian literature, “but I didn’t mind.” One afternoon while Robinson was playing pool at the ΣAE house, Abbo stopped by. “I got lucky and ran the table while he watched. Abbo snorted, ‘Being a good pool player is the sign of a gentleman. Being an expert is the sign of a misspent youth.’ Then he turned on his heel and left.”
    And Sewanee was the scene of a memorable exploit that demonstrated Robinson’s aptitude for all that “walking” that he later would do in the Garfield Quadrangle. During the first semester of his freshman year, Robinson and three companions — David Rose, C’36, T’38; Lee Belford, C’35, T’38; and Dick Kirchhoffer, C’40 — set off to hike from Sewanee to Atlanta. The plan was to walk without stopping except for brief intervals of rest and food. There would be no sleeping and no rides. They placed a 70-hour time limit on the trip. They carefully planned their itinerary and, at the last moment, alerted the press. The four set off before dawn on a Friday morning, and the following Monday morning Robinson and Rose staggered across the Atlanta city limits, where a news photographer gave them a ride into the city.
    Did he ever tell anyone what he had done, naming a mountain in Colorado after the Mountain? “My wife, I guess, and one or two colleagues. Oh, and in the 1960s when Sewanee got its first professor of geology, I wrote and told him. He never wrote back.”

Postscript:
    Charles Robinson, who was awarded his doctorate in geology by the University of Colorado in 1956, spent 17 years in the USGS. Since then, he has worked as a private-sector geologist and engineering geologist throughout the Rocky Mountain West. Today, he lives in Golden, Colorado, where he is the president of his own company, Mineral Systems, Inc. He has published more than 40 articles and books in his field, including Geology and Ore Deposits of the Garfield Quadrangle, Colorado (1957).

Merritt Blakeslee, C’68, practices international trade law in Washington, D.C. He has written two articles on the naming of the Collegiate Peaks, including an article on Sewanee Peak, for the Colorado Mountain Club’s Trail & Timberline, and a third for the Colorado Historical Society’s Colorado Heritage.