Mount of the Holy Cross

Mount of the Holy Cross rises 14,005 feet in Colorado’s Sawatch Range, a fourteener famous for the shape on its northeast face: intersecting snow-filled couloirs that form a white cross more than a thousand feet tall each spring. William Henry Jackson’s 1873 photograph of the cross became one of the most reproduced images of the American West, and for two decades in the twentieth century the mountain was protected as a national monument.

This map traces the architecture behind the image. The contour lines show the northeast face falling in tight bands toward the Bowl of Tears, the small lake cupped in the cirque directly beneath the cross. Halo Ridge curves around that basin in a long arc, carrying the alternate route to the summit, and the deep valley of Cross Creek separates the massif from the rest of the range.