Carlton Peak is a summit in the Sawtooth Mountains of northeastern Minnesota near Lake Superior, now part of a day-use area within Temperance River State Park. Its recorded name dates to 1848, when Reuben B. Carlton climbed it with Colonel Charles Whittlesey during a geological survey, and Whittlesey later named the mountain for Carlton. The peak’s origins reach back about a billion years to the volcanic era that shaped the Lake Superior shoreline in northern Minnesota. In that geologic process, blocks of anorthosite rose through magma; the magma later cooled into shoreline diabase, while the anorthosite formed Carlton Peak.