Yep, and Squaw Peak’s* are particularly bad. They stretch from trailhead to summit and no two of them are the same height!
*I read somewhere that its official USGS name is still Squaw Peak, though in Arizona it is “officially” Piestewa Peak (I’ve never met anyone who calls it that.) It’s supposed to revert back to Squaw Peak even in Arizona after a few years. I think it’s adding insult to injury to name something after someone for political reasons and then only make it temporary! Same with “The Piestewa Freeway”. It’s The 51.
I rode the first and last 25 miles of the Death Valley Double (my girlfriend was a hard core biker, I just did the Stovepipe-Furnace Creek/Furnace Creek-Stovepipe legs)
Those last miles were tough…we had a major headwind, and I nearly got smacked in the face by an owl. Ah, but what a fantastic experience: riding through The Valley at midnight by the light of the full moon–I’ll never forget it.
It’s temporarily named after her to #1 stir up support for the war and #2 circumvent discussion of the word squaw, which was mischievously dubbed offensive by some white rabble-rouser [back in the 1970s IIRC] and has been being eradicated ever since. I’ve been living here since the name change and I have not met one single solitary person, liberal or conservative, who agrees with it.
Sorry, Cisco to break your streak, but even as a conservative, I think it was kind of cool to name it after the first Indian woman ever killed in combat. I do object, however, to the utterly highhanded way our governor decided to ram it through without any hearings, or following the due process.
But, as you noted, everybody still calls it Squaw Peak.
None of my many Indian friends here ever objected to “squaw.” I believe it was some tribes in the northeast that first raised the question, but most Indians don’t give a hoot. Neither do any of them out here object to being called Indians rather than Native Americans. As one of my Navajo friends said, “Call me anything except late to dinner.”
I think it would be positively awesome to name something in Ms. Piestewa’s honor. Temporarily renaming a mountain for political reasons is an insult IMO. If it was renamed with the purest of intentions, why do all of the signs still say Squaw Peak? It was a knee-jerk that no thought was given to. Lori Piestewa was not even from Phoenix.
The name Piestewa Peak expires in a few years. Her death, unfortunately, is permanent.