With colleges starting up again, the students are getting out to repaint the letters on the side of the hill above the town. The "M" in the picture above represents the University of Texas at El Paso Miners.

These hillside monograms are fairly common out here in the west, where the trees don't get in the way of the scenery, and airplane pilots can use them to tell one town from another.

Here is a nice description of them, excerpted from

Hillside Letters in the Western Landscape" by James J. Parsons

(Reprinted courtesy of Landscape, vol. 30, No. 1, 1988.)

Giant capital letters adorn hillsides near many cities and towns in the American West. These letters, typically constructed of whitewashed or painted stones or of concrete, are cultural signatures. They serve as conspicuous symbols of community and institutional identity, and they represent an idea, perhaps traceable to a single point of origin, that diffused quickly and widely early in this century.

Hillside symbols have a surprisingly respectable history dating back some eighty years. To a remarkable extent the letters can be traced to a single decade, 1905-1915. They have almost always been built and maintained by college or high-school student groups. The earliest letter-building projects were devices for defusing increasingly violent inter-class rivalries, which college administrators and faculty found difficult to control. It apparently worked. Making a letter was often a gala community event, an organized "men's workday" declared a formal school holiday, with picnic lunch and supper provided by campus women."

Follow that link above to read more about it.


The website has lots of pictures of the monograms from all over the place.

My Aunt Irene lived in Battle Mountain, Nevada, and she always referred to this as Shit Mountain. You can see why.