This whole project was kept so quiet that most Americans still don’t know their local hiking trail is a royal relationship. For example, there’s a 14,000-foot giant in the Sierra Nevada called Ben Avon (after a Scottish Munro). Tourists snap selfies there, completely unaware that King Charles once wrote a letter about how its “granite cleavage reminded him of the Highlands.” That quote is real. He wrote that.
And the best part? Charles had no official authority to do this. He just started calling peaks by these names in his speeches. At a 2005 charity dinner, he stood up and said, “I now declare the peak formerly known as ‘Humpback Dome’ to be… Meall a’ Mhùthaidh.” People clapped politely, assuming it was a joke. It was not. The name stuck on hiking blogs after his secretary accidentally published it.
The One That Went Hilariously Wrong
Not every link was a success. Charles once tried to match the famous Scottish Munro Ben Nevis (the UK’s highest) with a peak in Wyoming called Cloud Peak. But there was a problem: Cloud Peak already had a name, and the local Shoshone tribe wasn’t thrilled. Charles, realizing his error, panicked and renamed a nearby rock formation as a consolation prize. That rock is now officially Prince’s Pebble. It’s five feet tall and shaped like a grumpy scone.
An Unlikely Munroist - Walking Post
Then there was the time he linked a Munro to a peak in Vermont that turned out to be a county dump. The dump’s operator was thrilled (“Now it’s a royal landfill!”), but cartographers had to issue a red-faced correction. Charles never admitted the mistake, simply saying, “All hills have dignity, even if they smell of old diapers.”
