Western State College of Colorado

This is the first of a two-part series about the W Mountain Race ahead of the 59th running of the race this Saturday. Tomorrow, Western State athletics will chronicle the history of the race itself.

GUNNISON, Colo. – For the 59th time since 1951, runners from Western State and across the valley will take part in the longest continuously-running race in Colorado Saturday in the W Mountain Race. The 2.8-mile race will climb 921 feet beginning at 10 a.m. on the south side of the mountain. The north side features the world’s largest collegiate emblem and provides the unofficial name for the mountain.

Tenderfoot Mountain, the official legal name for the mountain, was not the original home for the Western State emblem. In 1915, after Dean John Johnson returned from a visit to the University of California and observed the Big “C” overlooking San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. The Saturday after his return, students constructed a large “N” on Smelter Hill behind the college, to symbolize what was then known as Colorado State Normal School.

The “N” was later reconstructed into a “G” by Gunnison High School, and remains on Smelter Hill today.

Students and faculty began looking to Tenderfoot Mountain as a possible replacement for Smelter Hill in 1923 after Colorado Governor William Sweet signed a bill that changed the name of Colorado School Normal School to Western State College. Dean Johnson approached four students – Hugh Down, Burtis Adams, Nowell Hamm and Herbert Axtell – about their thoughts on building a stone “W” on Tenderfoot. The students endorsed the idea and agreed to take a leadership role in the project.

The five went to the football field – now the location of the Escalante Complex residence hall – to get a view of Tenderfoot and where it should be placed. The original plan called for the letter to stand 300 by 300 feet, but after a day of tying bed sheets to dead tree logs on the mountain, the group decided the letter was too short and increased the height to 400 feet.

Western State President Samuel Quigley decreed May 2, 1923, as a holiday for students and faculty to climb the mountain and build the “W”. Hundreds of flat rocks were carried up and placed within the outlines of the “W”. At 5 p.m., more than 135 students and faculty celebrated with a picnic on Tenderfoot after the last rock was placed.

May 2 became known as “W Day”, the annual college holiday for whitewashing the letter. No road existed to take people to the top of the mountain, so the freshman men carried the ton of lime to the top, while others constructed fires to melt the snow for the whitewash. The Top O’ the World compared the task of carrying lime to “leading an elephant over the Curecanti needle or carrying a piano up a grain elevator.”

In 1930, the college purchased the mountain from the State of Colorado for $1,436.35. In 1932, the blocks to the top and bottom of the “W” were added, making the dimensions of the letter 320 by 420 feet. The blocks made it twice as large as any other collegiate emblem in the world.

Conflict arose with various other schools on who had the largest collegiate emblem, most notably with Brigham Young and its “Y”. An April 15, 1948 article in the BYU student newspaper carried a picture of the “Y” and the caption “The Biggest Mountain Letter in the World.” Based on the dimensions and the picture, Western State mathematics professor Harvey McKenzie originally concluded that the “Y” indeed covered more area with rocks than the “W”.

But on further analysis of the picture, McKenzie reasoned that the stem of the “Y” could not be the original 60-feet originally quoted. In comparison with the rest of the “Y”, the stem was barely 40 feet, meaning the “W” still covered 1,355 feet more than BYU’s “Y”.

The tradition of students whitewashing the “W” faded in the 1970s due to lack of student interest and concern on injury. The “W” is still whitewashed prior to Homecoming, with the Western State Facilities Department providing the lead. In recent years, members of the Mountaineer football and track and field teams took part in the process.

“The ‘W’ and ‘W Day’ are not important as physical things; rather they are important as symbols,” said former Western State President Grant Venn. “As long as they remain symbolic of the things they stood for in the past they will help each one of us do a better job.”