Mount Wilson is the highest summit of the

San Miguel Mountains The San Juan Mountains is a high and rugged mountain range in the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico. The area is highly mineralized (the Colorado Mineral Belt) and figured in the gold and silver mining industry ...

range of the Rocky Mountains of

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

. The prominent

fourteener In the mountaineering parlance of the Western United States, a fourteener is a mountain peak with an elevation of at least . The 96 fourteeners in the United States are all west of the Mississippi River. Colorado has the most (53) of any single ...

is located in the Lizard Head Wilderness of San Juan National Forest, north by east ( bearing 12°) of the Town of Rico in Dolores County, Colorado, United States. Mount Wilson should not to be confused with the lower Wilson Peak nearby. The peak was named for

A.D. Wilson Allen David "A.D." Wilson (September 17, 1844 – February 21, 1920) was an American cartographer. Biography He was born in Sparta, Illinois. He left school and in March 1867, enlisted with the California Geological Survey, Geological Survey of C ...

, a topographer with the

Hayden Survey Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden (September 7, 1829 – December 22, 1887) was an American geologist noted for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century. He was also a physician who served with the Union ...

. He was in the first ascent party, which climbed the peak on September 13, 1874, via the south ridge (a difficult route, not often climbed today).Walter R. Borneman and Lyndon J. Lampert, ''A Climbing Guide to Colorado's Fourteeners'' (3rd ed.), Pruett Publishing, 1994, , pp. 231–239.

Climbing

Mount Wilson is ranked among the top ten hardest of the Colorado

s to climb.Louis W. Dawson, ''Dawson's Guide to Colorado's Fourteeners'', Vol. 2, Blue Clover Press, 1996, , pp. 160–165. The standard climbing route ascends the North Face from Navajo Basin. Some permanent snowfields exist high in the basin (sometimes termed "Navajo Glacier") and the climb usually involves snow travel, with ice axe and crampons recommended. Scrambling on rock then leads to the summit. A popular, though long, outing for expert climbers is the mile-long ridge connecting Mount Wilson to El Diente Peak. The ridge is sharp and rocky, and requires difficult scrambling and often a small amount of rappelling.

Geology and history

Mount Wilson, and the rest of the San Miguel Mountains, are made up of a large, irregular tertiary igneous

intrusion In geology, an igneous intrusion (or intrusive body or simply intrusion) is a body of intrusive igneous rock that forms by crystallization of magma slowly cooling below the surface of the Earth. Intrusions have a wide variety of forms and com ...

.Halka Chronic, ''Roadside Geology of Colorado'', Mountain Press, 1980, , p. 245. The Mount Wilson region became the site of intense mining activity, particularly for silver, in the early 1880s. The most famous of these mines was the Silver Pick Mine, which gave its name to Silver Pick Basin, just north of Navajo Basin.

Glaciers and permafrost

Mount Wilson contains four small glaciers on its summit, these being the southernmost modern glaciers in the Rocky Mountains and indeed the most southerly in the contiguous US outside the

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada () is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primarily ...

in California. These descend to . None of the glaciers have ever been named, and it has never been investigated whether they are presently active. At least nine

rock glacier Rock glaciers are distinctive geomorphological landforms, consisting either of angular rock debris frozen in interstitial ice, former "true" glaciers overlain by a layer of talus, or something in-between. Rock glaciers are normally found at high ...

s, composed of alpine

permafrost Permafrost is ground that continuously remains below 0 °C (32 °F) for two or more years, located on land or under the ocean. Most common in the Northern Hemisphere, around 15% of the Northern Hemisphere or 11% of the global surface ...

, exist on the northern slope of the mountain, extending down to around , although the lower limit of permafrost is more typically around . During the Pleistocene glaciers were much more extensive than today, covering the whole summit plateau In glaciations previous to the Wisconsinian, it is generally thought that summit ice caps were even more extensive and joined to form the "San Miguel Glacier" with icecaps in the San Juan Mountains.Atwood and Mather; ''Physiography and quaternary geology of the San Juan Mountains''; p. 72

Historical names

* Glacier Mountain * Mount Wilson – 1906

Notes

References

External links

Mt. Wilson on 14ers.com

{{Colorado Fourteeners of Colorado

Wilson Wilson may refer to: People * Wilson (name) ** List of people with given name Wilson ** List of people with surname Wilson * Wilson (footballer, 1927–1998), Brazilian manager and defender * Wilson (footballer, born 1984), full name Wilson Ro ...

San Juan Mountains (Colorado)

San Juan National Forest