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This is the world’s largest lighted letter, signifying its allegiance to the Colorado School of Mines. It is a large letter “M” atop the face of Mt. Zion overlooking Golden, made of whitewashed rocks, and measures 104×107 feet, each leg measuring 10 feet wide. Every fall incoming freshmen bring new rocks up here to add to the M, whitewashing the rocks and themselves, and every spring graduating seniors come up here and get to take one of the rocks with them. The M was designed by CSM professor Joseph Francis O’Byrne in 1908 as an extremely difficult problem in descriptive geometry, and he succeeded in creating a letter that does not appear distorted from any angle.

It is the second-oldest college letter monument in the nation only to the University of Utah’s “U”. It rests at 6,900 feet above sea level, on a slope of 23 degrees. CSM rivals have attempted to destroy it but they were not as well versed in explosives as the Miners. In 1931 the M was lit for the first time, and it has been continuously lit since March 19, 1932. Every holiday season since 1935 it has lit in red. Today its lighting system can turn the M into all sorts of creative color and shape arrangements at night, controlled from campus via telephone modem. It even counts down the days until the end of the semester.

In 2008, the “M” underwent an update to bring it into line with the “green energy” focus that Governor Bill Ritter has envisioned for all state institutions. The 1553 light bulbs that make up the M were changed from incandescent to LED, which was projected to save Mines hundreds of dollars on electrical costs, and pave the way to eventually power the “M” using only solar energy.