Mount Harvard, a 14,421-foot summit in central Colorado’s Sawatch Range, is the highest of the Collegiate Peaks and among the loftiest mountains in Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, and the contiguous United States. It was named in 1869 by members of Harvard’s first Mining School class traveling with Professor Josiah Dwight Whitney, during the same expedition that named nearby Mount Yale. Those university names, later joined by others, gave the Collegiate Peaks their identity. S. F. Sharpless and William M. Davis made the first recorded ascent on August 19, 1869. In the twentieth century, a Harvard prank left a tall metal pole on the summit for about two decades.