The Gazette16%
Quest to rename Pikes Peak stalls for one man, but another proposal is queued for consideration 6%
By Debbie Kelley6%
8/2/2026, 6:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Negativity Bias, and Unattributed Quote, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 10.8% saturation with 180 hits. Analysis detected 1,000 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,662 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 17.5% and a BS Rank of 6% (23,986 of 25,473 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 94.20% of the article peer group.
D’Arcy Straub is reluctant to add up the number of hours he spent on an effort to rename 97 of Colorado’s mountains.
Hundreds.
Maybe more.
The former Denver patent attorney and current federal employee recently was notified that all the proposals he submitted two years ago to the U.S.
Board of Geographic Names have been rejected.
That includes his idea to recast Pikes Peak as Fluorite Mountain, referencing a mineral that’s found in the Pikes Peak region.
Through erosion, it’s released into the drinking water system, which led a local dentist to the discovery that calcium fluoride helps prevent cavities.
Straub thinks that’s a more apropos nod to the past instead of the mountain bearing the surname of a U.S.
Army explorer.
However, Straub did not meet the minimum qualifications on his applications, according to the national board.
He failed to garner local support for each idea, consult with Colorado’s resident tribal nations and determine whether federal land managers support, are neutral or oppose his suggested name changes.
So his proposals will not advance to the next step.
But the work he did was not for naught to Straub, a 60-year-old competitive bicycle racer and diligent hiker.
Over the past 40 years, he’s climbed more than 500 of Colorado’s peaks that top 13,000 feet, including all 58 named fourteeners in the state.
That’s when inspiration struck, while he was pitting his physical abilities against the call of the mountains and the strength of nature.
He noticed physical characteristics, such as how an image of a beaver appears to be climbing up the side of Longs Peak.
He thinks it would make sense to call it Beaver Peak.
“To me, that offers better possibility for naming peaks rather than people naming peaks after their friends.”
Straub’s objective is not to rename every single peak.
“In a sense that would be selfish,” he said.
“It’s more to introduce the concept.
This issue isn’t going to go away.”
In raising awareness, he’d like to “initiate a new way to name peaks,” he said.
“Peak names can be created to possess themes that will withstand the test of time and have as much meaning in the future as they do today.”
Straub also wants to see more consistent rules.
For example, a peak cannot be named after a person unless the person has been dead for at least five years.
Straub believes that type of waiting period also should apply to groups of people, not just individuals.
If such a timetable existed, he thinks a recent sticky situation might have been averted.
After Mount Evans was renamed Mount Blue Sky in 2023 and controversy over the new name erupted, Straub said he thought there must be a better, more equitable way to conduct the process.
That’s when he began his renaming quest.
Mount Evans honored Colorado Gov.
John Evans, who had ties to the Sand Creek Massacre, in which women and children were killed.
But a dispute developed between two Tribal Nations, the Cheyenne and the Northern Cheyenne.
The latter opposed the name Mount Blue Sky because Blue Sky is part of the Cheyenne Arrow Ceremony, and the Northern Cheyenne people considered it sacrilegious to the Tribe to “throw that name around in public,” according to written communication the Tribal administrator submitted three years ago.
“The Northern Cheyenne concerns were dismissed,” Straub said.
“The name Mount Blue Sky was approved out of political expediency.”
In July, a conservative group, Advance Colorado, filed a petition to President Donald Trump asking him to reverse the name back to Mount Evans.
No word yet on whether that’s going to happen.
Straub proposed that Mount Evans adopt the name “Snowy Owl Mountain,” and that neighboring peaks be called Wisdom Mountain, Integrity Mountain, Respect Mountain and Empathy Mountain.
But his suggestions didn’t gain any traction, including after he appealed to Gov.
Jared Polis.
The Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board, formed by Polis in July 2020, debates referred proposals from the U.S.
Board of Geographic Names before making recommendations to the governor about a geographic name change, a new name and name controversies of geographic features and certain public places.
The governor then makes recommendations back to the national board for a final decision.
As part of a federal initiative to remove derogatory words from geographic features, in 2022 the national board required states to drop the Native American slur “squaw” from 660 features on federal lands, including peaks, valleys, passes and creeks.
There were 28 such sites in Colorado, including two in Teller County, which are now named Evening Star Mountain and Maize Gulch.
A sign, Tava Mountain of the Sun, sits in the foreground of a view of Pikes Peak from Woodland Park.
(Debbie Kelley, The Gazette)
The movement to discard names that are deemed offensive as language and usage have changed or that reference a negative time in history is relatively new and emotionally charged.
Let’s just say Straub didn’t make any friends with his massive amount of submissions.
“It was not well received,” he said.
“It’s a minor societal issue — does it change anybody’s life?
Not really.
But people get really upset over it.
It’s become controversial.”
There’s another attempt to have Pikes Peak renamed.
The national naming board has forwarded one proposal it received to the state advisory board that would revert Pikes Peak to Tava Mountain, according to the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, which oversees the advisory board.
The department won’t speculate on the chances of whether that would come to fruition, said spokesperson Chris Arend.
“Each proposal is considered on a case-by-case basis and weighed by the board on its own merits,” he said.
The application has not been formally introduced as an agenda item for the state advisory board, Arend said, so members have not yet considered the issue.
“The process of collecting and vetting additional information to allow the board to fully consider the issue takes time,” he said.
“And with this work and the existing suite of other proposals also in the queue, it is not expected to be on the agenda in the near future.”
If no one succeeds in ushering in a new name for Pikes Peak, Straub envisions that hundreds of years from now Zebulon Pike will have no meaning to most Coloradans and a renewed interest will take root and grow.
“Change is difficult,” he said.
“Sometimes it comes slowly.”
Pikes Peak has been known by several names
What today might seem like a haphazard system of how mountains and other landmarks were named in the 1800s actually was not.
It was perfectly acceptable for explorers and pioneers of the 19th century to put their name, or those of political figures or financiers, on prominent public features in the United States.
Pikes Peak has been known by several names.
For several hundred years, it was “Tava,” which means “Sun Mountain.”
The Cheyenne Mountain Utes who lived in view of the 14,115-foot landmark called it that, according to History Colorado .
The local Utes liked the name so much, they started identifying as the Tabeguache, which means the people of Sun Mountain.
When the Arapaho people arrived in the area in the early 1800s, they named the mountain “Heey-otoyoo or “the Long Mountain,” history tells us.
Spanish Explorers of the 1700s borrowed the Indigenous name and initially called the peak “Montana del Sol,” or “the Mountain of the Sun.”
They later renamed it “El Capitan,” meaning “the Captain” or “the Leader,” for its prominence along Colorado’s Front Range.
U.S.
Army officer Zebulon Pike, who rose to the rank of brigadier general in the War of 1812, led two expeditions into the Louisiana Purchase Territory in the early 1800s.
He was declared the first person under the emerging United States to lay eyes on the mountain when he ventured westward.
He tried but failed to climb the beastlike formation and in journal entries called the mountain “the Grand Peak” and “Highest Peak.”
Anglo-American settlers began referring to the mountain as “Pike’s Highest Peak,” while others retained the Spanish “El Capitan.”
Some called it “James Peak,” in honor of Edwin James.
The botanist is credited with being the first person known to reach the summit of Pikes Peak on July 14, 1820.
He did have another Colorado mountain named after him, though and a wilderness area to boot.
James Peak is a thirteener southeast of Winter Park in the James Peak Wilderness Area.
Emergence of Pikes Peak
Pikes Peak was first called “Pikes Peak” by newspapers during the Colorado gold rush that began in 1858 and lasted into 1861, according to History Colorado.
That was nearly 50 years after Zebulon Pike first laid eyes on the mountain that would bear his name and many years after his death.
He died in 1813 at age 34, when he was struck by debris from a gunpowder magazine explosion during the Battle of York.
Shortening names was common in newspapers at the time to save precious newsprint space, History Colorado says.
The name stuck and became popular among gold prospectors known as the “fifty-niners,” who made their way west to find fortune and fame in 1859.
“Pikes Peak or Bust!”
their signs declared, as the mountain became a symbol of hope and survival and prosperity for some.
In 1890, the year the U.S.
Board of Geographic Names was created, the body officially declared “Pikes Peak” as the name of the mountain at the foot of Colorado Springs.
Note the lack of a possessive apostrophe, which has been standard policy for geographic proper names.
“Each name the mountain has had reflects its importance to the various peoples who inhabited the area,” History Colorado writes.
“Ute and Arapaho, Spanish and English — so many groups have called Colorado home over the course of many centuries, and all have wondered at the majesty of the Mountain of the Sun.”
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