Photographers can be honoured in many ways – winning a prestigious award such as the World Press Photo perhaps, or being knighted by the Queen. However, an American nature photographer has now been given the rare honour of having a mountain named after him.

Ira Spring, who died in 2003, was a keen climber who spent his life exploring and photographing wilderness areas in the US and across the rest of the world. He was also a dedicated campaigner for the protection of the American wilderness, which led to him being awarded a Roosevelt Conservation Award by President George H.W. Bush in 1992 (so presumably he would have been unhappy at this recent news). As reported in the Seattle Times, Spring’s photographs of remote parts of his home state of Washington may have featured in as many as a million copies of various books and guides.

The mountain chosen to be named after the photographer is fittingly inaccessible – the 5,700-foot Ira Spring mountain cannot be viewed by road and there is no trail leading to its peak.

This is not the first time photography has influenced the naming of the America’s expansive geography. In 1948, a group of surveyors exploring a previously undocumented area of Utah even named the region after the brand of film they used, and the Kodachrome Basin State Park was born.