Cowles Mountain

This guide to Cowles Mountain in San Diego starts with an absence: no giant letter marks the slope in front of you, even though one once did. It traces the story back to 1931, when about five hundred students from what's now San Diego State painted a four-hundred-foot white S across the hillside, and forward to April 1942, when wartime officials looked at that letter from the air and ordered it covered. Along the way you'll hear who the mountain is actually named for, a Connecticut-born rancher who died without ever knowing the honor was coming, and about a graduation prank decades later that tried to put new letters back. Take in the view from the summit and see what's missing from the hillside now.