Expressions of Pride
Marking the Mountains
By Lucy Burningham, 7-18-05
The practice of putting permanent letters of the alphabet on the side of mountains has always baffled me. While it seems like a Utah tradition because of how many letters cover our foothills, I’m aware that other parts of the country share the Beehive state’s penchant for these large-scale installations that represent school and hometown pride. But to me, even the most intact letters just look like ugly pieces of graffiti.
I was reminded of these alphabetical eyesores by an article in The Salt Lake Tribune today about a controversial 40-foot “K� in the southern Utah town of Kanab. A new Kanab resident, Rick Lewis, wrote a letter to the editor in the Southern Utah News complaining about the plan to install a new “K� on a mountainside. (The town’s “K� has been consistently disintegrating since 1920, when the first version was erected.) While Lewis initially complained about the merits of the project, he now says he’s upset about the fact that the Boy Scout spearheading the project didn’t go through the proper channels.
Enter the BLM, which took public comments on the topic until last Friday and will now review the application for a permit to erect the “K.� The Tribune reports that most of the town thinks Lewis is a loony newcomer who is trying to change a valuable tradition. But I propose that Lewis may just value his new mountain view. Why don’t towns, high schools and universities start new traditions that don’t involve scarring visible foothills? Can’t we learn to be satisfied with simple t-shirts and bumper stickers? And don’t tell me we’d be missing out on hiking to something on the side of the hill—knolls and peaks work just fine.
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The only time it has happened in recent times was when a special sign of the Olympic rings was set up temporarily, floating bright in the early winter night above Salt Lake, an ornament to give an Olympic flavor of celebration to the entire valley, along with the massive photos of skaters, skiers and sledders that wrapped tall buildings in a single bond--of admiration for athletic achievement and pride that Utah was hosting the world.
Certainly the communities or schools that sponsor these hillside signs should be responsible for maintaining their appearance, and ensuring there is no collateral damage to the landscape, but as long as they are maintained in that way, what's wrong with them?
We who have buried our heads in the modern world of video games and DVDs and the Internet have few enough expressions of unifying community identity. Every time an alumnus sees that letter on the mountain slope above his or her school, it evokes the kind of warm memories of "alma mater" that loosen his wallet enough to send a few dollars to support scholarships and endowed professorships at the old school.
No one is forcing anyone to support the signs with money or time. Not a single species has become endangered because it was next to a flat, whitewashed concrete sign that is visited perhaps once a year.
We should have a sense of proportion, and humor, about it. We live in a time when people with a high capacity for expressing their personal irritation about the views of their neighbors think that they have a constitutional right to be a killjoy, especially when it concerns use of the public lands. Well, the rest of us are irritated right back.
Finally, Ms. Burningham should realize that many of these signs have acquired the patina of historicity through decades of visibility. Under the National Historic Preservation Act, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are obligated to consider the eligibility for historic registry status of such long-standing features of the landscape, if they are on Federal lands, and consult with the State Historic Preservation Office on measures to preserve such historical artifacts that have matured to a point where they help to tell the story of America.
There are old, broken-down concrete roads across the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California that are on the National Registry of Historic Places because of their association with the development of that region. The "U" and the "Y" above Salt Lake and Provo tell of a unique folkway that exists primarily in the Mountain West (where hills are handy), and are just as important to the self-concept of Utahns as the old (and now fallen) Great Stone Face was to residents of New Hampshire. Even though it had no special ecological or geological significance, it was on the face of the state's quarter due to the human perception of it as a natural sculpture of a noble man, that invited human aspiration to similar nobility.
The faces on Mount Rushmore are an artificial homage to the Great Stone Face, and are in the same taxonomic genus, surely, as the letters for cities and universities. The main difference is the Black Hills monument's size and its role as a unifying symbol for our entire nation rather than just the community of Rapid City and the state of South Dakota. If you can obliterate the "U" that stands for the University of Utah, and in many minds for Utah itself, there is no difference in principle from obliterating Gutzon Borglum's heroic sculpture.
--I am a resident of Idaho Falls, Idaho, a native of Utah, and a former resident of Washington, California, Nebraska, Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, and Japan.