OK. Looks like nobody is going to guess this one. The mountain is Manly Beacon in Death Valley. Not the highest peak by a long shot, but one with an amazing story--told here with help from Wikipedia.

In 1849, at age 29, William Manly joined the thousands of American Forty-niners traveling to California to participate in the Gold Rush. He began traveling overland from Wisconsin.

Upon reaching the Green River, just west of South Pass, Manly and a half dozen other men tried to float to California by floating on an abandoned ferry they found down the Green to the Colorado River, then on to California. To fix the planking on the boat, they had to chop down trees and form the boards with their hand tools.

As had William Ashley done almost 25 years previously, they put in the river in Wyoming, and floated through the canyon of the Gates of Lodore. But, unlike Ashley, who disembarked at the mouth of the Duchesne River after experiencing the treacherous canyon, Manly may have traveled further down, to present day Green River, Utah where the Old Spanish Trail crossed the river.

Wherever they did disembark, they were met by Chief Walkara, who helped them to travel overland to the Wasatch Front. And this kindness was not forgotten by Manly. It was twenty years later, 1869, that John Wesley Powell's party was successful in floating further down the Green to the Colorado, then on to the California/Arizona border.

South of present-day Provo, Utah, Manly joined other Forty-niners traveling to southern California, including two families with small children. In December, these pioneers became lost in the Great Basin Desert, and entered Death Valley having followed an inaccurate map for three weeks. Remembering Chief Walkara's help, Manly argued strongly against raiding the Indian food caches that these 49ers found along the route, although his arguments were largely ignored.

Their food supplies were almost exhausted, and the oxen pulling their wagons were dying of starvation. The families stopped at Furnace Creek in Death Valley. They could go no further.

Manly, with his associate John Haney Rogers, trekked 250 miles on foot across the Mojave Desert to Rancho San Fernando near Los Angeles, California, to scout an evacuation route for the families trapped in Death Valley, and procure food and horses if a settlement could be located.

They arrived, nearly dead. But once in San Fernando, Manly took only two days to use the funds to buy supplies, and then hiked back the 250 miles to Furnace Creek to rescue the remaining members of his party. Once he got to Furnace Creek, he gave the group only a few days to prepared, then led them BACK over that same 250 mile route to safety.

Manly himself had hiked 750 miles over the most torturous terrain in North America on a mission of mercy to rescue the families at Furnace Creek. While a couple of the older men in the party died, Manly managed to rescue all of the women and children.

Manly Beacon is a tall white mountain that projects out above Furnace Creek near Zabrisky Point, and so it served as his guidepost to find the families he had left there.

In the compilation of his memories, Manly contacted all the relevant persons possible, then with the aid of a publishing assistant wrote the greater part of his autobiography, "The Death Valley in '49," published as a book in 1894. The title was changed to "Death Valley in '49," ostensibly to encourage sales, although Death Valley is only spoken of in the tenth chapter.

The book is an excellent read. In it, Manly recounts how, as the Bennett and Arcane families began their climb out of the valley through the Panamint mountains south of Telescope Peak, someone in the group, probably Sarah Ann Bennett (née Dilley), or Mrs. J.B. Arcane, turned to take a last look eastward and said "Goodbye, Death Valley!"

Mrs. Bennett, upon her death bed many years later, sent word to William Manly that she would like to see him once again before she died. He immediately left Southern California to race northward and was able to visit with her just a day before her death in San Jose. She always called him the Guardian Angel of her children.

They don't make men like that anymore.