The story of how Mt. Mahler got its name goes back several decades to 1968, when I was a geology graduate student at the University of Wyoming. That spring, two climber friends and I made plans for a May climb of 12,940-foot Mt. Richthofen, the imposing high point of the Never Summer Range on the northwestern boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park in Jackson County, Colorado.

Despite what the calendar might say, early May climbs in the Rockies make for winter mountaineering--the approach was on snowshoes with full cold-weather gear. That May, perhaps due to the difficulty of the peak in the ice and snow, we weren't able to handle Richthofen. Instead, we summited its slightly lower and technically somewhat easier western neighbor, a then-nameless peak which is a most handsome and worthy summit in its own right in a spectacular setting. Worthy, indeed, to bear the name of Gustav Mahler.

Why Mahler? Western mountains bear the names of artists, scientists, politicians, generals and even prostitutes (Mount Silverheels near Fairplay, Colorado). However, I know of no mountain, in the U.S. at least, named for a composer. Why not Bach, Beethoven or the great American, Gershwin? Certainly these would be fine names for peaks. But for me, there are passages in Mahler's music that, more than any other composer, capture the essence of the high mountain experience, with its joy, awe and occasional terror. The first movement of the Ninth Symphony perfectly conveys that sense of beholding the Infinite that, if one is lucky, one feels a few times in one's life atop a peak. No one could ever put that feeling into words, but Mahler has done it with music.

So, having found an unnamed peak worthy of Mahler's name, I wrote the Board of Geographic Names of the United States Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., formally proposing the peak be named after Mahler. I received a letter back from them (which I have long since lost), thanking me for my interest and effort, but denying my request. The exact wording, which I will always remember, was, "We can find no connection between Mr. Mahler and this mountain."

I was, of course, disappointed, but congratulated myself for giving it the old college try and laid the matter aside.

Of course, among a few close friends, the idea stuck. My friend Edmund Mohr, also a Mahlerite and inspired by my example, petitioned the Board in 1980 to put the Mahler name on a 13,370-foot peak near Buckskin Pass in the spectacular Elk Range southwest of Aspen. He, also, was met with refusal.

There things rested until October 2003, when, on a business trip to Denver, I stopped in to visit my friend Edmund. I was sitting in his living room and casually browsing a recreation map (constructed from USGS topographic maps) of the northern Colorado Rockies. I couldn't believe my eyes. Lo and behold, 35 years after I first came up with the idea, peak 12,493' had an old familiar name.

Mount Mahler was on the map.

—Robert C. Michael '66 is a consulting geologist in Santa Barbara, California.