Uncompahgre Ute
The Tabeguache believed that the Pikes Peak region is their home. Their name for Pikes Peak is "Tavakiev", meaning sun mountain. Living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, summers were spent in the Pikes Peak area mountains, which was considered by other tribes to be the domain of the Utes. Pikes Peak was a sacred ceremonial area for the Tabeguache Utes, or people of Sun Mountain, including their Sundance grounds and culturally scarred Ponderosa Pines that were used for different purposes, including prayer, burial, peeled-bark medicine, and arborglyphs or message trees. Some of the trees are 800 years old. An endowment was established by the Pikes Peak Historical Society in 2001 to help members of the Ute Nation to return to their homelands around Pikes Peak.
In the fall they would travel Ute Pass and visit the springs where they "made offerings to the spirits of the springs for good health and good hunting". There were about ten mineral springs, called "manitou" for the "breath of the Great Spirit Manitou" believed to have created the bubbles, or "effervescence", in the spring water. The springs were considered sacred grounds where Native Americans drank and soaked in the mineral water to replenish and heal themselves. Ute and other tribes came to the area, spent winters there, and "share[d] in the gifts of the waters without worry of conflict." Artifacts found from the nearby Garden of the Gods, such as grinding stones, "suggest the groups would gather together after their hunt to complete the tanning of hides and processing of meat."
James Eccles
Pic Eccles at the foot of the Innominata ridge on Mont Blanc is named after him, as is the Eccles bivouac hut below Pic Eccles's summit. Col Eccles on the Brenva side of Mont Blanc is also named after him.
Eccles was one of the first British mountaineers to make ascents of the higher peaks of the Rockies. On 7 August 1878, in a party of eight including surveyor Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, topographer A. D. Wilson and Eccles's favourite guide, Michel Payot, Eccles made the second ascent of Fremont Peak (once mistakenly considered the highest peak in the Rockies); he also climbed Wind River Peak in the Wind River Range while accompanying the Hayden Survey, together with A. D. Wilson and Payot. Eccles offers the following description of Wilson:
Eccles attempted to make the first ascent of Grand Teton (an ascent was claimed in 1872 by Nathaniel P. Langford and James Stevenson, but was probably of The Enclosure, a side peak of Grand Teton) in 1878 with Wilson, his assistant Harry Yount, and Payot. Eccles and Payot were unfortunately held up by the disappearance of two mules, and so were unable to accompany Wilson and Yount.