It looms over the Enchanted Circle at 13,167 feet — the highest natural point in New Mexico, the rooftop of the state, visible from Red River, Eagle Nest, and Taos alike. For most of its known history it was called Taos Peak, after the town to its west. Then, in 1950, it was renamed for a man who never lived in New Mexico but mapped it: Major George Montague Wheeler.
Wheeler was a West Point graduate and Army engineer who led one of the great scientific enterprises of the American West. In 1872, Congress authorized an ambitious plan to map everything west of the 100th meridian at a scale of eight miles to the inch, and Wheeler's Corps of Engineers expeditions took on the job. For the rest of the decade, his parties of surveyors and naturalists fanned out across the Southwest, collecting geologic, biologic, planimetric, and topographic data across New Mexico and six other southwestern states.
The Wheeler Survey lasted until 1879, when Congress ended it along with the King and Powell surveys and reorganized their combined work as the United States Geological Survey. The USGS — the agency whose maps, quadrangles, and bulletins still document every creek and claim in the Red River mining district — is the direct institutional child of Wheeler's decade in the field. The work produced volumes of reports, maps, and photographs, many of them now preserved in the Library of Congress.
Wheeler's name ended up on the map in more places than one: a Wheeler Peak in Nevada's Snake Range, the Wheeler Geologic Area in Colorado, and the 13,167-foot summit of the Taos Mountains. A plaque at the New Mexico summit states that the mountain was named in his honor, commemorating ten years of surveyors and naturalists collecting data across the Southwest.
So the peak above the Enchanted Circle carries two histories in one name — the town it once honored, and the surveyor who gave the West its maps. Hikers who climb the Williams Lake trail to the summit today walk through both: a landscape that belonged to Taos long before it had a name in English, measured and recorded by the men with the theodolites, and now wearing the name of the man who sent them.
Planning a Red River getaway? Book your stay at the Claim Jumper A-Frame 6
