Summit of Mount Yale, Colorado Postcard

Mount Yale is one of nine fourteeners in the Collegiate Peaks, in the central part of the Sawatch Range near Buena Vista, Colorado. It is the 21st tallest peak in Colorado and the 5th highest in the Collegiate Peaks. Mount Yale was first climbed by a research team from Harvard University led by Josiah Whitney. The group named the taller Mount Harvard (14,400 ft) after their own university and the shorter Mount Yale after Whitney's alma mater. Due to the similarity in heights of Mount Princeton and Mount Yale (Princeton is 1-foot (0.30 m) higher), it was once a tradition for the alumni of each school to carry rocks to the top of their respective mountain in order to add to the stone pyramid built at the summit. The graduates used these rock towers to ensure their mountain was the tallest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Yale photo by Arvind Mohanram