This Gunsight Mountain is located in Glacier National Park in northwest Montana. Part of the Lewis Range, Gunsight is situated directly on the Continental Divide northwest of Mount Jackson and north of Lake Ellen Wilson. The sedimentary rock of Gunsight Mountain was shaped by 1.6 billion years of geologic processes from sediment deposition, uplift, thrust faulting, and erosion by glaciers. The major geologic event that sculpted the landscape of Gunsight Mountain and the other peaks in Glacier National Park began approximately 2 million years ago when large ice sheets of the Pleistocene Ice Age repeatedly advanced and retreated until about 12,000 years ago. The fourth largest glacier in the park is the Sperry Glacier, which is located on the north slope of Gunsight Mountain, but like most of the glaciers in the park is receding due to global warming. The Sperry Glacier is named for Dr. Lyman Sperry a professor from the University of Minnesota who made the first ascent of Gunsight in 1905 along with his party. A couple years earlier, Dr. Sperry recruited students from the University of Minnesota to construct a trail to the headwall below Sperry Glacier and today is used as the standard approach route. The mountain has distinct peaks: snowy 9188 is the summit where Sperry and party left their names in a can, and 9258 is the higher rocky summit. Sperry also applied the name to Gunsight Mountain.
Refer to A Climber's Guide to Glacier National Park, by J. Gordon Edwards for information about climbing routes and special dangers.
|Range/Region:||Central Montana Rockies|
|Best months for climbing:||Jul, Aug|
|Year first climbed:||1905|
|First successful climber(s):||Lyman Sperry|
|Nearest major airport:||Great Falls, MT|
|Convenient Center:||St Mary, MT|
Thanks to theyogiclimber for adding this peak.
Download any of the following KML maps for use in the full screen Google Earth application: Central Montana Rockies, Rocky Mountains, or North America. For more information, see our Google Earth page.
NOTE: Trip reports were previously called "Summit Logs" - same feature, new name
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