Mount of the Holy Cross
Colorado mountain whose cruciform geology inspires religious devotion
Mount of the Holy Cross
✟ Christian | Holy Cross Wilderness Area (Eagle County), CO
Between Vail to the north and Leadville to the south, in the Sawatch Range, rises this unusual 14,005-foot mountain featuring a 1500-foot couloir (vertical cleft) intersected by a 750-foot horizontal bench, forming a Christian cross that keeps snow well into July. Because of its remote location, Mount of the Holy Cross was known largely in rumor and seen by very few until the celebrated western photographer William Henry Jackson took the first-ever photo of it atop nearby Notch Mountain in 1873. Here is Jackson in his own words:
On this day, as usual, I pushed on ahead, and thus it was that I became the first member of the [Hayden] Survey to sight the Cross. Near the top of the ridge I emerged above timberline and the clouds, and suddenly, as I clambered over a vast mass of jagged rocks, I discovered the great shining cross before me, tilted against the mountainside.1
Jackson’s photo was an American sensation, inspiring a famous painting by Thomas Moran (now in the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles) and a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in memory of the tragic death of his wife. Pilgrims flocked to see the cross by climbing Notch Mountain, just as Jackson had done.
A stone hut, the Notch Mountain Shelter, was constructed atop Notch Mountain in 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps to shelter hikers and host Sunday masses. It is a single-room building with 18-inch-thick stone walls and a massive stone fireplace inside. CCC workers used mules to haul up timber for the door and roof and glass for the windows, which face west toward the Cross.
According to a Summit Daily article, this was also the birthplace of “handkerchief healing.” At the urging of a Denver pastor, sick people around the country began mailing in handkerchiefs, and the pastor carried them up Notch Mountain, prayed over them, and mailed them back to their owners. In 1932, he schlepped 2000 handkerchiefs, enlisting two rangers to help carry the load.
Between 1929 and 1950, there was a Holy Cross National Monument, but after a rock slide that marred the cross’s right arm, visitation declined, and the area was stripped of the designation and returned to the Forest Service. Today, Mount of the Holy Cross is the centerpiece of the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, created in 1980.
Hikers summit the mountain to “bag” one of the state’s many fourteeners, or they climb Notch Mountain for the iconic view and shelter. Pilgrims still journey here for inspiration, solitude, and prayer. A plaque upon a prominent granite boulder on Notch Mountain reads:
This plaque is in memory of WILLIAM H. JACKSON the pioneer photographer who took the first pictures of THE CROSS on August 23, 1873 from the high point north of here while working for the U.S. Hayden Geological Survey
Plaque placed here June 23, 1963
R.F. Ruhoff E.M. Yeager
Sources: National Parks Traveler | 5280 | EARTH Magazine | Colorado Encyclopedia | See also Clarence S. Jackson & Lawrence W. Marshall, Quest of the Snowy Cross (Univ. of Denver Press, 1952).
Visit (hike) date: June 22, 2024
» Part of the “Holy Places” series at Blessings of Liberty «
William Henry Jackson, Time Exposure, p.217 (New York, 1940), quoted in Richard A. Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West, p.112 (Univ. of Okla. Press, 1962).