Colvin granted the fifteenth High Peak its name in his 1872 report to the New York State Legislature. William C. Redfield served as the inspiration, a meteorologist and early explorer of the High Peaks who organized and participated in the first ascent of Mount Marcy in 1837. Redfield collected and shared valuable geographic information about the region as a result of his 1836 and 1837 trips. Ed Phelps participated in the first recorded ascent up Mount Redfield in 1894, as he led a man with a last name of Elquin or Elkin to the summit (Phelps could not remember his first name).

Redfield gained global notoriety as a meteorologist after publishing an article about storms in 1831 in the American Journal of Science. The paper, titled “Remarks on the Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast” described Redfield’s revolutionary ideas about wind patterns during hurricanes. A decade earlier, after the “Great September Gale of 1821,” Redfield noticed that trees in central Connecticut had blown over toward the northwest while fallen trees in Massachusetts pointed to the southeast. Because the winds had seemingly switched directions just seventy miles apart, Redfield concluded that hurricanes blew in a circular whirlwind pattern. He also identified the eye of the storm as a vacuum at the center of the whirlwind.

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^{Moore, Peter. The Weather Experiment. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, 2015, Nautilus, nautil.us/issue/25/water/the-dueling-weathermen-of-the-1800s.}