Mount Columbia (Colorado)

Mount Columbia is a high mountain summit of the Collegiate Peaks in the Sawatch Range of the Rocky Mountains of North America. The fourteener is located in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness of San Isabel National Forest, northwest by west of the Town of Buena Vista in Chaffee County, Colorado, United States. The mountain was named by Roger W. Toll in honor of his alma mater, Columbia University, and in commemoration of its rowing victory at the renowned Henley Royal Regatta in 1878.

Mountain

Along with nearby Mount Harvard, Mount Yale, Mount Princeton, and Mount Oxford, Mount Columbia is one of five Collegiate Peaks named for prominent universities. The forest service recommends that hikers take the Horn Fork Basin Route, an 11-mile roundtrip that gains 5,800 feet in elevation. In 2021, the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative completed a new trail on Mount Columbia's west slopes, bypassing the old user-created trail through a notoriously eroded scree field.